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| Photo - Neil Hoare |
Irish songwriter A.S. Fanning announces his fourth studio album Take Me Back To Nowhere, arriving February 6th via K&F Records. Now he kicks off the album lead up with ‘Romance’, offering the first glimpse into Fanning's most disorienting and immersive work to date.
Opening with layered synths that build into an anthemic crescendo over a steady drumbeat, ‘Romance’ showcases Fanning's distinctive baritone voice—drawing comparisons to Nick Cave—delivering a stark, disillusioned meditation on love and human connection. The track maps emotional desolation onto stark sonic terrain, stripping love down to its rawest components: fear masquerading as desire, need mistaken for connection.
"This is a disillusioned love song," Fanning explains. "Representing a feeling of hopelessness through imagery of a barren physical landscape. There's also some hint of room for hope or vulnerability in the line 'love lets you in…' but it's generally quite a cynical song suggesting that romantic feelings are just a confused mixture of fear, need, and desire."
The single introduces broader themes that run throughout Take Me Back To Nowhere: inescapable isolation and the idea that our relationships are shaped more by our internal chaos than any genuine connection with others. "In some ways it touches on the wider themes of the album," he continues "That everyone is isolated and that their own issues and interior processes are what's informing their relationships with other people—that who you fall in love with is just based on your own particular cocktail of neuroses, which you somehow find reflected in another person."
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| Photo - Alex Squire |
Winnipeg-based Living Hour releases their new album Internal Drone Infinity. With 10 tracks coming in around a 30-minute runtime, the latest record sees the indie rock band move away from dreamy shoegaze sounds in favour of tightly controlled and cathartic sonic release through heavily distorted guitar riffs.
“Everyone’s kind of angry, we’re getting pissed, the world is fucked, and sometimes it feels like I can’t just be in a nice indie rock band anymore playing twinkly things,” lyricist Sam Sarty says about the change in style. “It’s still nice to do that, but I think there needs to be a release, a scream, or a grunt or something.”
With a lifelong practice of noticing the little, mundane details, and framing them to show potential beauty, Sarty has honed her composing and songwriting skills to the point of finding moments of beauty in places full of literal garbage.
"Texting is written from this really mundane but intimate point of view of trying to explain Winnipeg to someone over text," she says. "In the winter, everything disappears in the snow, but when the snow melts, we’re left with the mosaic of shit. I keep a list on my phone of things I see on the sidewalk: garbage that breaks my heart or situations that I try to explain, either to myself or over text – that blue bubble carrying my thoughts somewhere else."
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| Photo - Emma Palm |
Mariel Buckley - Strange Trip Ahead (Album).
Acclaimed Americana singer-songwriter Mariel Buckley returns with her third studio album, Strange Trip Ahead, out now via Birthday Cake Records. Following the success of her 2022 Polaris Prize–longlisted album, Everywhere I Used to Be, Buckley steps boldly into a new sonic chapter — one that blurs the lines between alt-Americana, indie rock, and emotive confessional songwriting.
Serving as the album’s emotional centerpiece, “Anvil” captures the tension of life-altering decisions in a relationship — specifically around the question of whether to have children. Co-written with Nashville songwriter Robby Hecht and featuring Buckley’s brother T. Buckley on mandolin and background vocals, the track is one of the most meticulously constructed on the record.
“Anvil explores the decision around having kids — those ‘will we/won’t we’ conversations,” Buckley explains. “As a woman and as a queer person, the scrutiny around that choice is intense. It forces you to look unromantically at what partnership and permanence really mean.”
Driven by heavy rhythm sections, pedal steel tension, and Buckley’s soaring vocal delivery, the song embodies the weight of love and inevitability — a slow burn that simmers with emotional gravity.
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St. Louis-based singer-songwriter Malena Smith has shared her latest single, “Maybe,” an emotionally raw preview of her upcoming debut EP, 27 in Maine. Following the transparency of her previous release, “Paralyzed,” this new track, written by Sonca Nguyen, Jack Pordea, and Joshua "Paco" Lee dives even deeper, capturing the tension of love in limbo.
Simply put, “Maybe” is a love song, but beneath its gentle melodies lies a layered emotional landscape and an introspective plea, a yearning for the other person to return and affirm your feelings. It's a confession, a question, and a prayer for emotional clarity in a relationship hanging by a thread.
With introspective lyrics, delicate harmonies, soulful guitar and skillful mandolin, “Maybe” reflects the intimate emotional spaces we often keep hidden. “I’ll wait for your answer / Just ask me the question / Don’t leave me to figure it out / I promise to show you / Whatever you go through / I’ll be by your side,” she sings, inviting the listener into a quiet but powerful moment of sensitivity. “I’ve been there more times than I’d like to admit in my twenties, maybe that’s why it resonates so deeply,” she shares.
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By the time an artist makes their third album, it’s a safe bet they’ve learned a few lessons. In the case of Canadian singer/songwriter Josh Ritchie, those lessons led to taking control of all aspects of So Much More Than A Dream, with the result being a dynamically powerful 11-song collection that blurs the lines between modern rock, experimental folk, and contemporary r&b.
In some ways, it’s the sound of our age, where genres are fluid, and an artist has the tools at their fingertips to take any idea and construct a unique sonic landscape out of it. In film parlance, it’s been called “the auteur theory” for decades, and for Josh Ritchie, it guided his vision throughout the making of So Much More Than A Dream.
In short, So Much More Than A Dream can be described as a concept album telling the story of a young adult searching for peace and purpose in our increasingly turbulent world. It’s hardly a stretch to say that theme mirrors much of Ritchie’s life to this point, having grown up BIPOC in Ontario’s Bruce Peninsula. Much of his music to date has been a product of his experiences, but on So Much More Than A Dream he pours his soul into each song, as on the first single, “Numb,” which asks the increasingly common question, “Do you believe in anything at all?”
Josh clearly believes in many things, and wants you to believe in them as well. On the anthemic new single “Celestial,” he firmly pins his heart to his sleeve, running through the list of things that sustain his spirit, with love firmly at the top. Later, on the stunning ballad “Vancouver,” he sounds like a young Leonard Cohen, surveying the wreckage of his life amid the wreckage of the inner city. But it’s “Small Town Boys” that Josh highlights as a personal triumph.
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