Indie Rock
Wolf Alice Announce New Album Blue Weekend, Share “The Last Man on Earth”: Stream
The last album Wolf Alice put out, Visions of a Life, earned them the coveted Mercury Prize in 2018. Now, it looks like they’re preparing to turn heads again with a brand new full-length called Blue Weekend. It’s due out June 11th via Dirty Hit/RCA, but you can stream the lead single “The Last Man on Earth” in advance below. This is the band’s third studio LP, following Visions of a Life and 2015’s My Love Is Cool. The British alt-rockers created Blue Weekend in hopes of emboldening their storytelling and refining their musical style. “The Last Man on Earth” makes good on that promise by pushing singer Ellie Rowsell‘s voice to the front over ballad-style piano, lush vocal harmonies, and empowering percussion. Come the end, the Wolf Alice track could be mistaken for a rousing...
Horsegirl Share New Single “Ballroom Dance Scene”: Stream
Teenage Chicago noisy rock trio Horsegirl have released a new single called “Ballroom Dance Scene”. Watch its corresponding music video down below. Band members Penelope Lowenstein, Nora Cheng, and Gigi Reece wrote the song, which details the lives of various fictional characters, during the fall 2019 Chicago teacher’s strike. They created the accompanying video during this past winter break, shooting it on their phones and an old digital Canon camera. Street footage was filmed in the band’s “aux-less 2004 Buick LeSabre,” while the indoor scenes were shot in the attic of Reece’s childhood home. The song itself features layered vocal melodies and builds from restrained opening acoustic strum, bringing in swirling electric guitars midway through. “Ballroom Dance Scene” serves as an ampl...
Guided By Voices Announce New Album Earth Man Blues, Share “Free Agents”: Stream
Guided by Voices released three albums in 2020, and it looks like they plan on continuing that impressive pandemic pace in the new year. The legendary indie rockers have just announced another new record called Earth Man Blues, due out April 30th via Rockathon. Earth Man Blues is the 33rd studio album (!) of Guided by Voices’ career. It’s comprised of songs from the past decade that were never used on previous LPs and organized here to create an overall theme. After realizing it sounded like a musical stage production, Robert Pollard decided to lean into that style and named the album after his elementary school’s theater playbill. “I was blown away that I had discarded them,” Pollard said of the tracks in an interview with Rolling Stone. “Anyway, I combined some of them and created new ar...
Song of the Week: serpentwithfeet Gains Traction with Soulful “Same Size Shoe”
Song of the Week breaks down and talks about the song we just can’t get out of our head each week. Find these songs and more on our Spotify Top Songs playlist. For our favorite new songs from emerging artists, check out our Spotify New Sounds playlist. This week, serpentwithfeet gains traction with “Same Size Shoe”. There are two types of hype in the music business. One type makes it feel like an artist has the primal forces of nature behind them, controlling all media and advertising to make it seem like their next album will not only be the next canonical masterpiece to change music forever, but also the antidote to all that ails our suffering species and planet. And, then, there’s the type of hype that seemingly finds root in the tiniest speck of soil imaginable and slowly grows from th...
The National’s Matt Berninger Shares New Song “Let It Be”: Stream
Last year, The National’s Matt Berninger released his debut solo album Serpentine Prison. The record was delivered to streaming services with 10 songs, but fans who scooped the limited-edition double vinyl LP were treated to an additional six bonus tracks. Now, Berninger is giving everyone the opportunity to hear those extra cuts, starting with an original tune called “Let It Be”. Next month, the indie-rock veteran will include the bonus tracks in a proper deluxe edition of Serpentine Prison, which will be available both digitally and physically. The extra goodies include “Let It Be”, another original song, and four covers of tracks by Eddie Floyd, Morphine, Bettye Swan, and The Velvet Underground. Like the majority of the album, “Let It Be” is a soft and gentle track that moves at a ...
HAIM Share New Fire Remix of “Gasoline” Featuring Taylor Swift: Stream
HAIM and Taylor Swift have been friends for quite a while now, and they committed their friendship to wax last year when the sisters hopped on her evermore track “No Body, No Crime”. Now, they’re teaming up once again, this time with Swift putting her own spin on their Women in Music Pt. III cut “Gasoline”. As eagle-eyed fans pointed out, HAIM started teasing “Gasoline (Featuring Taylor Swift)” earlier in the week with some cryptic tweets and a TikTok video of them cranking the remix together in their car. As could be heard in that audio snippet, this new version of “Gasoline” sees Swift singing gracefully over the original version, all sweet harmonies and luscious tones. Swift had long been hot on “Gasoline” according to a statement from the sisters. “since we released wimpiii in june, ta...
Finn Wolfhard’s The Aubreys Share Origins of New Single “Sand in My Bed”: Stream
In our new music feature Origins, artists are tasked with letting fans behind the curtain of their latest single. Today, The Aubreys reveal how they found “Sand in My Bed”. Celebrities, they’re just like us — even in a pandemic. Plans put on hold, friends kept at a digital distance, milestones left uncelebrated, things we’ve all experienced over the last year regardless of our notoriety. Finn Wolfhard’s summer 2020 should have been spent promoting Ghostbusters: Afterlife, reveling in his high school graduation, or jamming with drummer Malcolm Craig in their new project The Aubreys. The band had only been around for a few months following the dissolution of Calpurnia in the fall of 2019. They’d released their debut Soda & Pie EP in March, and then like the rest of us, found th...
Song of the Week: Haviah Mighty Channels Her Jamaican Heritage on “Obeah”
Song of the Week breaks down and talks about the song we just can’t get out of our head each week. Find these songs and more on our Spotify Top Songs playlist. For our favorite new songs from emerging artists, check out our Spotify New Sounds playlist. This week, rapper Haviah Mighty channels her Jamaican Heritage on “Obeah”. Multiculturalism asks us to acknowledge and embrace the diversity within our own communities. Most of us try to live out that idea, recognizing that others experience the world (even the same community) differently than us and draw from different sources and traditions to cope with the daily challenges that we all face. That’s the crux of “Obeah”, the latest song by hip-hop artist and 2019 Polaris Prize winner Haviah Mighty, who our own Wren Graves describes as “one o...
Alex Lahey and Gordi Join Forces on New Collaborative Single “Dino’s”: Stream
Australian indie rockers Alex Lahey and Gordi have teamed up on a new collaborative single. It’s called “Dino’s” and it comes with a cinematic music video that brings the song’s lyrics to life. Stream it below. For nearly three years now, Lahey and Gordi have been steadily chipping away at creating this song. According to a statement from the two artists, “Dino’s” was inspired by the East Nashville dive bar of the same name, which both of them frequented while touring in support of their latest albums, The Best of Luck Club and Our Two Skins respectively. Once the ongoing coronavirus pandemic brought live shows to an indefinite halt, they were eager to revisit the special mood cultivated at places like Dino’s through song. “We wrote it on a very humid summer’s day in Nashville before ...
Cherry Glazerr Release New Song “Big Bang”: Stream
Cherry Glazerr have returned with a new song called “Big Bang”. For this one, the Los Angeles garage-rock band continue to move in the poppier direction that their last couple singles have hinted at. During Cherry Glazerr’s breakout years in the mid-2010s, the band, led by frontwoman Clementine Creevy, were standouts in the West Coast garage and surf revival. Their 2014 album Haxel Princess helped define that era, but 2017’s Apocalypstick and 2019’s Stuffed & Ready saw the band develop into a bigger, fuller rock sound akin to groups like White Reaper and Bleached. Then, at the end of 2019, the group collaborated with their former tourmates Portugal. The Man on a track called “Call Me” that had a much sleeker sound. After a year of radio silence, they dropped a ...
Arcade Fire and Owen Pallett Are Finally Releasing Their Score to Spike Jonze’s Her
In 2013, Arcade Fire and Owen Pallett wrote the score for Spike Jonze’s Oscar-nominated film Her, which starred Joaquin Phoenix and Scarlett Johansson. For whatever reason, the soundtrack was never properly released either digitally or physically, but next month that’ll finally change. The Canadian-turned-New Orleans indie-rock institution and their frequent collaborator have announced that they’re officially issuing the Her (Original Score) on digital, vinyl, and cassette formats in mid-March. The soundtrack, which was nominated for “Best Original Score” at the 2014 Oscars, will be broken up into 13 songs and come packaged with a unique album cover that’s not a mere crop of the film’s promo poster. Her was a strange sci-fi tale about a man who falls in love with a...
Phoebe Bridgers Talks SNL Guitar Smash and Marilyn Manson on CNN: Watch
Phoebe Bridgers has been the talk of the Internet this week thanks to an iconic Saturday Night Live performance and her “horrible” experience at Marilyn Manson’s house. Now, she has opened up about both of those moments in a new video interview with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour. Amanpour began the 14-minute-long TV segment by asking Bridgers about her SNL performance, specifically the guitar smash that has drawn both melodramatic criticism and praise. As it turns out, the whole thing was staged, all the way down to wielding a cheap guitar and using a fake monitor intentionally designed to collapse and shoot sparks. “I’ve always wanted to do it and when I mentioned it to the show, they built me this whole monitor that would look like it was exploded even if I wasn’t hitting it that hard,” expl...
