Lakes - Sam Teskey - NOGA

Lakes - Retrograde.

Watford based six-piece ensemble Lakes have just shared the moving new single Retrograde, taken from their forthcoming new record ‘Start Again’. The band recently announced their signing to Big Scary Monsters for the new album, out 30th July.

Talking about the new single, co-lead vocalist Blue Jenkins said "Retrograde is inspired by a particular experience of trying and failing pretty spectacularly to navigate an avoidant attachment, despite impassioned arguments for the cause on both sides. It's about how confusing and frustrating it can feel to try and work together with somebody only to keep coming up against the same problems, and how sad it still is when you finally have to let it all go."

After a handful of self-releases and a stint of heavy touring with the likes of Nervus and Orchards, the pandemic forced Lakes to slow down, having been catapulted a long way in a short space of time through consistent hard work and sheer tenacity. The six individuals that make up Lakes took the opportunity to formulate new ideas ready for their newest offering, and fired by a strong ‘do it yourself’ ethic, they collaborated remotely on bringing each other’s stories to life. The resulting album, mixed by Neil Strauch (Owen, Owls, Joan Of Arc, Anathallo, Slow Mass etc), captures themes of healing, hope and relief.

“This batch of songs has been a vehicle for healing for all six of us in some way, so there are a lot of different but raw themes throughout the record. Even though we’re currently all isolated from each other, the one person you can’t escape is yourself,” says co-lead vocalist Roberto Cappellina. “We talk about anything from mental health to addiction; from break ups to cutting out toxic friends, to postpartum psychosis. We’ve been to some dark places between us, but ultimately, ‘Start Again’ is about coming out the other side. This record is about facing that darkness, owning it and letting go of the past. It’s about being at peace with it and moving forward and saying that it’s actually OK to start again.”

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Sam Teskey - Love.

Inspired by the cycles of life, Sam Teskey, guitarist of critically-acclaimed, blues-soul band The Teskey Brothers, announces his debut solo album, Cycles, a collection of music influenced by the great English psychedelic bands of the late ’60s & ’70s, out on Decca Records on Friday 8th October. The first track on the album Love, out today, is a stirring, pastoral folk song that establishes the album’s own life cycle, ending with the reprise Then Love Returns.

Born out of lockdown in early 2020, with touring at a stand-still, Teskey relished in the opportunity to return to his vast back catalogue of incomplete musical musings he’d amassed whilst writing for The Teskey Brothers over the years. Painstakingly digging through old demos, spending time with the development of the songs, keen to make a record that would be enjoyed as a complete body of work. Starting where most finish, he settled on the track-listing before recording a note, thoughtfully building on the original ideas, with each track evolving to seamlessly melt together with the next.

On his debut album, Teskey says: “When on the road touring, I spend most of my time writing songs, so I have a massive collection of songs and ideas ready to go. Once I figured out that they all work together like that, it happened really organically. I love listening to albums that have progression and take you on a journey. A big point of this album is for people to create their own journey and their own story. I can say many things about the record, but I want to leave the experience up to the listener. It feels nice to put the creativity back in the listeners’ hands.”

Cycles offers a thrilling and immersive journey; the seven tracks ebb and flow like a stream of consciousness, shying away from traditional song structures and negotiating a range of genres from orchestral balladry, dissonant and ambient soundscape, all the way through to folk and heavy psych-rock. Determined to capture the music in its purest form, Teskey, enlisting the help of musician friends, live recorded the album almost exclusively live to tape at his analogue home studio in Warrandyte.

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Photo - Sarah Fosco

NOGA - Any Kind Of Dream.

After years of touring the world on bass with Cass McCombs, Renata Zeiguer, and many others, NOGA (aka Noga Shefi) has regrouped to bring listeners The Alchemist -- a short collection of new songs out July 30. Inspired in part by Paulo Coelho's classic mysticist novel of the same name, The Alchemist follows NOGA's experience of untangling life's great dualities: dreams and reality, light and dark, known and unknown, self and other.

Today NOGA has shared the second single from the EP, "Any Kind of Dream" -- a tender, colorful, shimmering song about letting go of something that is no longer serving you in order to create space and allow new ideas. Of the song, NOGA says, "When there is new space after letting go of something heavy and old, there is so much lightness and space to dream of a new vision."

Written during a quiet period of time off in Israel, NOGA recorded the EP back in NYC at the Relic Room, with Scott Colberg on bass and guitar, Jason Nazary on Drums, and Frank LoCrasto on piano and synths. The EP was mixed and mastered by Greg Saunier.

In the novel The Alchemist, the protagonist is made to take on a great quest spanning years and continents. It is not just about chasing dreams, but about the refinement of the alchemist's skill and ability to turn something worthless into gold. On "The Alchemist," the EP's titular, opening track, NOGA grounds her anxieties by reminding herself that the heart and mind is responsible for how one experiences reality. Just as the alchemist can turn cheap metal into gold, NOGA's songs are inspired by the magic of turning unfortunate situations into wisdom and love.

The Alchemist follows NOGA's Mutual Heart Vibes EP (mixed and mastered in collaboration with Ryan Power) and her debut album Calla Lily, which she describes as "songwriting as a way of controlled demolition."

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Penelope Antena - Alyssa Joseph - Joe Taylor Sutkowski - Mara Simpson

Penelope Antena - Back To Stay.

Living and creating in the shadow of an esteemed family legacy, alone in the woods on a mountaintop in the Occitanie region of southern France, Penelope Antena is the heir to a musical throne of mythological stature… and one she lives up to with newfound ambition to push tradition into a 21st Century soundscape. Her 2019 self-produced LP Antelope (KowTow Records) put her otherworldly production style on full display, declaring Penelope as a visionary songwriter and creative force.

Her mother is the renowned singer Isabelle Antena (a pioneer of Electro Samba), her grandfather jazz pianist Marc Moulin (the reason Blue Note opened its EU headquarters, and who was sampled by the likes of Jay Dilla). Fast forward to today and Penelope is carving out her own genre melding path that has garnered praise from the likes of Rolling Stone, Marie Claire, France Inter, and many others.

By integrating tradition and technology, Penelope provides a unique voice in international indie and electronic music. Her forthcoming 2021 release (via Brooklyn’s boutique label Youngbloods) exemplifies an expansion of her creative inspirations, adapting folk, Americana, and gospel sensibilities.

Recent highlights include performing at legendary venue, La Villette in Paris, touring the US in the fall of 2019, 2020 singles “20 Down” and a collaboration with Minneapolis based artist Peter M, “First PO”.

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Alyssa Joseph - leaning.

Rising indie-rock singer Alyssa Joseph releases a beautiful lyric video for her song “leaning”, which can be found on her critically acclaimed “alive” EP that dropped last month. 

“leaning” describes the period after she graduated college when she was forced to move back home with her parents in New Jersey and face judgment from the world while she longed to move to Nashville. The lyrics candidly expose the difficulties young millennials go through post-grad, as she declares “all my money goes to student loans and the god-damn government”.

The lyric video, which Joseph recorded while driving around Nashville, takes the song full circle. Showcasing the lyrics in the video allows viewers to understand the meaning behind this vulnerable song on a deeper level. When she sings, “they say it’s strange that I’m still leaning, but I’m still leaning” she is being honest that even as an adult she doesn’t have it all figured out and it’s okay to ask for help. The video showcases the understated beauty of “Music City” and offers a sense of hope that dreams can still come true. Even though Joseph was stuck in New Jersey living with her parents when the song was written, her dream of moving to Nashville materializes in the video.

Alyssa Joseph is a thriving singer-songwriter based in Nashville, Tennessee. She has toured through Texas and up and down the Northeast, playing at Sofar Sound shows in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Louisville. Her recent EP -- titled “alive” and released on June 4th, 2021-- received wide acclaim from the local and national press, including Guitar Girl Magazine, Music Crowns, Broadway World, and a five-out-of-five star review on Square One Magazine. She is an advocate for body positivity and creating a more diverse and inclusive space within the music industry.

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Joe Taylor Sutkowski - What Luck, Goodbye.

The New Jersey-born now Brooklyn-based artist, Joe Taylor Sutkowski is today announcing details of his debut album, Of Wisdom & Folly alongside sharing the first single, "What Luck, Goodbye." Sutkowski, who is known for his work fronting Dirt Buyer and playing under the Jotay moniker wrote the forthcoming ten-track record, which is out via LA-based artist-run label, Danger Collective Records on August 13, 2021, as a series of five different pairs of stories, each telling the tale of a different character.

While taking a run through pandemic-stricken Brooklyn in 2020, Sutkowski found himself inspired by the odd and visually appealing lyrics of Chocolate USA (a lesser-known project of Elephant 6 / Neutral Milk Hotel collaborator Julian Koster). The endearing depiction of a pretzel-headed schoolgirl named Sherry inspired a swirl of ideas and characters for Sutkowski, who wrote the first song – "Sherry Had a Pretzel Head" – for the record immediately after returning home from the run.

Sutkowski’s warm, emotive vocal delivery and fingerstyle classical guitar are the clear foundation for the album, something cemented with this first single, "What Luck, Goodbye". As a narrative, it arrives as the mirror track to the album opener, "Jordan Was a Little Bottle Rocket" and tells the story of Megan, a desperate dreamer who finds a bottle rocket named Jordan in the pocket of her jacket who she flies away with.

In addition to its precise instrumentation, Of Wisdom & Folly showcases Sutkowski’s ability to paint colorful and defined lyrical illustrations, while maintaining a creative voice and vision that keeps the album grounded. Though the album’s puzzling nature often feels like a dream, the perspectives of the characters are lively, heartbreaking, and ultimately human. “It’s supposed to be vague and make you feel strange, but also at ease,” Sutkowski says, “but I express many real feelings through the medium of characters and their stories.” The performances on the album feel connected to its content and vulnerability, with ominous outros and the inclusion of imperfect studio moments that create a tangible intimacy.

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Mara Simpson - In This Place.

UK multi-instrumentalist and story-teller Mara Simpson has announced her new album In This Place will be released on September 24th, 2021. A heady blend of alt-folk, analogue synth and classical composition, In This Place is a tale of quiet rebellion and taking back control. Fittingly, the new album marks the start of another new journey for Mara. In This Place will be the first record to be released on Downfield Records, a non-profit imprint set up by Simpson, placing artists at its centre. “I want to try and promote transparency and equality, assist other artists to get public funding and to ‘pay’ forward the time and resources I’ve benefited from,” she says. The label’s mission is to see musicians paid fairly and release records through a creative and joyous process. 

Whilst the struggles of 2020 will go down in history, for Mara it was 2019 that was the tough one.  A year spent consumed by worry, whilst in and out of hospital with her one year old daughter, had left Mara feeling like she was playing a constant game of catch up with a world that wouldn’t slow down. With songs ready to be recorded for her new album, she headed into the studio to record with her producer. 

“I stepped into the studio not needing my hand held, just my voice heard” explains Mara, who quickly came to the realisation that she was working in a toxic environment with a producer whose moods everyone had started to dread. “Ironically, at the end of a year spent managing my daughter’s breathing issues, I had an asthma attack induced by the studio’s hypoallergenic cat,” she laughs. “Enough was enough.” 

It was whilst waiting for a train that she had the sudden realisation that the album she was recording would never see the light of day. Struck by an overwhelming feeling of failure, Mara began to ruminate on the time and money she had wasted but then something clicked. “Perhaps it’s something about train stations, the coming and the goings, that allows a stagnating frame of mind the grace and space to clear,” she says. “The funny thing is, upon realising failure, the despair I’d been feeling was now replaced with something else...Relief”. 

Feeling re-energised, Mara called her dream producer Ellie Mason, of Voka Gentle, and together the pair began working on a new record. “I’ve been more hands-on with this album than I’ve ever been, taking a much more active role in production. Throughout the whole process Ellie has heard my voice, and been open to any possibility” explains Mara. “We’ve stumbled across golden moments, recording four part harmonies in Brighton’s oldest church, using every drum there is in Brighton Electric, layering New Zealand bird song with tape delayed piano, all thanks to her nurture, playfulness and kindness,” she continues. 

Title-track ‘In This Place’ is about the confrontation between mother and newborn child. The ‘sizing-up’ of one another as they embark on a new journey together. “When I left home to travel around the world and was so worried about breaking my Mum’s heart,” says Mara. “I just remember her saying that your children are never yours to keep. This is a song about the rawest of loves, and the fact that however much we love someone, they are never ours, and the beauty in that.”

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Vök - Central Heat Exchange (feat. Stephanie Smith) - Lexie Roth (feat. Willy Mason)

Vök - Skin.

Icelandic trio Vök have shared the stunning video for their enchanting and reflective new single Skin, which is out now through Nettwerk Records.

New single Skin follows recently released single and video Lost in the Weekend, which gave an early taste of their new material recorded last year in their Reykjavík studios. The single was the follow-up to their acclaimed 2019 album In the Dark, which was written and recorded by the band in collaboration with producer James Earp (Bipolar Sunshine, Fickle Friends, Lewis Capaldi).

With every track, Vök continue to develop their progressive alt-pop sound and Skin cements just how intricately captivating the band can be. Opening emotively and delicately, the song builds to an ethereal and pensive chorus that lyrically conveys someone not knowing who they are and being stuck in their own ‘skin’. The expansive video, directed by Arnar Helgi, shows the band performing in a stunning location at Rauðhólar outside of Reykjavík amidst a backdrop of mountains and neon lights as the sun sets.

Lead singer Margrét says; “Our character has been living by the standards of her community but feels like she is betraying herself. She is afraid of who she is becoming, as that person is someone that she doesn’t relate to, and she feels trapped and doesn’t know who or what she is – she is stuck in her own skin.”

Through their unique and lushly layered sound that blends electro and indie with forward-thinking pop and a self-assured aesthetic, that is just as striking as their sound, Vök continue to cement their position as one of the most exciting alternative bands right now. Following two critically acclaimed albums, Lost in the Weekend and Skin are just the first musical moments in an exciting year for Vök, with further new music announced soon.

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Central Heat Exchange (feat. Varsity's Stephanie Smith) - Directly Down.

Central Heat Exchange (C.H.E.) is a collaborative project by musicians spread throughout the US & Canada, primarily in the Central Time Zone. Split across Austin, Chicago, & Winnipeg, its core members are Adam Soloway of Living Hour, Santiago RD of Daphne Tunes and Jacob and Paul Stoltz of Varsity and Pool Holograph, though their forthcoming recorded output involves a broad network of collaborators that include members of Broken Social Scene, Lala Lala, Fran, The Weakerthans, Sun June, Do Make Say Think and many others. Today they are formally announcing their self-titled debut album (due out September 10th on Birthday Cake, Citrus City and Sunroom Records) and sharing the single "Directly Down," which features lead vocals from Stephanie Smith of Varsity and drums from Lala Lala's Abby Black.

"'Directly Down' started as a demo for another project, Discus," says Paul Stoltz. "It was initially tracked in March at the beginning of quarantine while Jake and I were planning to record the second Discus LP. As it became apparent that we were not going to be able to record in person for quite some time (still haven’t), I added this song to the mix for CHE."

The drum machine, rhythm guitar, bass, and post-chorus ambient sounds were all tracked by Paul on a Tascam 4-track tape machine. Jake tracked some loose vocal melodies for the song in addition to his lead guitar, but was unsatisfied with the way they turned out. That's when we turned to Stephanie Smith from Varsity, an amazing singer and frequent collaborator or ours. The whole track has a stumbling, spiraling vibe that Stef highlights in her lyrics beautifully, taking Jake's initial lyrics about a depressive spiral and morphing it into a song about humans destroying the earth."

"It's a song about humans destroying the earth," Smith continues. "We’ve destroyed it so much by now that maybe we're past the point of no return but maybe we’re not."

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Lexie Roth - Western Skies feat. Willy Mason.

Like many artists, acclaimed pop-folk singer/songwriter, Lexie Roth, found inspiration in the world shutting down and then slowly coming back to life. Roth is dropping a poignant new single, “Western Skies,” set for release on July 9, via American Songwriter.  Roth plans to release the official video for “Western Skies” later this month.

"I wrote Western Skies after spending a significant time on the west coast and on the road driving across the country, over six times now,” shares Roth.

“There is a certain innate grief that comes over me when driving through small desolate towns. I wanted to imagine what my personal pain would feel like through the lens of a husband being widowed by his beloved wife and being left to raise their children without her. I wanted to depict how moving it is for him to see her."

Produced by Roth, “Western Skies” features vocal contributions from Willy Mason, as well as ethereal slide guitar riffs from Roth’s father, Arlen, a virtuosic guitarist who has performed and recorded with the best artists of his generation, including Bob Dylan, James Taylor, Simon and Garfunkel, The Bee-Gees and Phoebe Snow. The soon-to-be-released video for “Western Skies” was directed by David Henry Gerson, whose work has won prizes from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the Sundance Film Festival, and has been acquired into the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in NY.

Raised between Westchester, New York and Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, Roth released her eponymous, bluesy debut album in 2012, which included the song ‘Call You My Hon,’ featured in the award-winning film Maria My Love. Roth, who is often compared to artists like Lucy Dacus and Jenny Lewis, has a way of creating music that is soul-inflected, with the wisdom and weight of American music history in an eminently listenable contemporary package.

Lexie Roth · Western Skies feat. Willy Mason

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Motorists - Pearl & The Oysters - Good Job Honey

Motorists - Through To You.

Toronto's motorik jangle-pop trio, Motorists have just shared their new single, "Through To You" which arrives with an accompanying video inspired by the German TV show, Beat Club. In tandem with sharing the new music, the band are announcing their debut LP, Surrounded which comes mastered by Mikey Young (Total Control, Eddy Current Suppression Ring) and is set for release via We Are Time – a new label, part-helmed by Chandra Oppenheim – Bobo Integral and Debt Offensive on September 3, 2021.

Driving is a huge part of rock and roll’s enduring mythology. Images of cruising down the highway with friends and lovers while basking in the freedom of the open road pervade pop music’s lyrical canon. Yet, so often, these idealized images clash with the everyday drudgery of being a motorist: traffic jams, detours, and bad news on the radio.

This tension is central to Surrounded, an album that is as much about the colourful possibilities of life as it is about the way those possibilities are boxed in by technologies. In a world where everyone’s been in their own bubble, Motorists have pushed theirs together and worked through feelings of isolation as a group to the tune of jangly guitars, infectious power-pop hooks, and a steady motorik beat. Surrounded is an album about modern living and, as Fahner succinctly describes, “isolation in a technologically saturated society, laden with romanticism around radical togetherness.”

The album's first single, “Through to You”, is a song about yearning to connect with other people, attempting to peel back the curtain of solitude that has engulfed us over the last 15 months or so. Written during the first lockdown, when hope for a bit of familiarity was starting to blossom, it zeroes in on the desire to feel close to someone without having to speak a word. The band addresses this notion beautifully, both lyrically as a feeling of “flowing through the veins of another heart,” and musically with the brightest jangly melodies on the album and a wistfully sweet vocal.

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Photo - Laura Moreau

Pearl & The Oysters - Soft Science (feat. Kuo).

The LA-Based, French-American Psych Pop Duo Pearl & The Oysters have just shared a video for "Soft Science". Flowerland is the third album from them and will be available September 3rd, 2021 via Chicago’s Feeltrip Records.

With the band having recently relocated to LA, the album was intended as the final installment of Pearl & The Oysters’ ‘Florida trilogy,’ begun on their self-titled debut (2017) and continued on Canned Music (2018), a space age odyssey equal parts fawning over the Floweredland’s natural spectacles and mourning the peril that climate change has wrought on it all.

In comparison with previous releases, Flowerland reveals more of the inner workings of Davis and Polack’s minds, with the pair trading fantastical stories about zany characters for more personal narratives detailing worries of the everyday and universal variety. While the music remains primarily indebted to the escapist optimism of late-1960s soft pop, cloudier themes such as eco-anxiety, depression, and the stresses of finishing graduate school are all explored (somewhat cryptically) in the lyrics, although never in an overwhelming way. For Davis and Polack, Flowerland was meant as an attempt to channel crippling emotions into an uplifting listen, rather than a deliberately heavy experience.

P&TO’s take on Richard Tee and Stuff’s mellowest moments, the title track is in keeping with the band’s extended space opera metaphor seeing Florida become a foreign planet on which Davis and Polack crashed—rather than safely landed—, an unexpected but ultimately lucky detour. In the admittedly semi-autobiographical opener « Soft Science, » the band tries their hand at nouvelle vague romantic candor, in a duet staging a lovers’ trivial but tender argument, backed by samba-inspired percussion and phasing electric piano swirls. « Evening Sun, » one of P&TO’s more affected and pessimistic tracks to date, turns the ‘Endless Summer’ trope on its head by contemplating the concerning proposition hidden (in plain sight) behind what was once as a catchy slogan for tourism: when is the paradisiac promise of an eternal Summer actually becoming a dystopian menace? With its reverb-drenched flutes and whirling analog synthesizers, it is without doubt the album’s most cinematic cut.

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Good Job Honey - Crazy Country.

Is the reward worth the risk? Sometimes all you need is to stray away from the beaten path, take a leap of faith, and follow your heart. West Coast-based folk band Good Job Honey invites you to take the leap of faith in search of adventure in their latest single, “Crazy Country.” 

A track reflecting on the universal woes we in society all live through, the band speaks on life and its trials and tribulations over a country inspired melody. The song illustrates embracing the risk of following the unknown path with the hope of a greater reward at the end of the unclear journey. Good Job Honey releases “Crazy County” on all digital platforms now. 

The third release from the band's long-awaited debut album, Why You So Sticky, out July 30, 2021, “Crazy Country” showcases the band's versatility and sonic style. Written by a family member, the track shines a spotlight on lead singer April Roberts' commanding and delicate voice. Good Job Honey aims to let their unique sound be heard while inspiring others to live their authentic selves.

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