Today marks the triumphant return of Puppy Problems and the announcement of their second album, Winter In Fruitland. Due out September 22nd via Anything Bagel Records, Sami Martasian and co. recorded the album at Big Nice Studio, and while there’s definitely an upgrade in fidelity, the heart in the songs remains ever apparent.
Melbourne via Hobart quartet It Thing recently announced Constant State / P.C.H, the much anticipated follow-up to their excellent 2021 debut Syrup. Out now via Marthouse Records (AU) and Feel It Records (US), the band come burning out the gate with their signature chaotic energy, but more importantly, their sound is glued in massive hooks.
Jayne Dent’s experimental folk project Me Lost Me has been blending traditional instrumentation with electronic drones and playful art pop since the mid 2010s. On RPG, she aims to pay tribute to the art of world-building and storytelling, drawing a throughline from folk songs and folktales to ambient electronica and video games.
With six years separating Faunas’ debut and Paint The Birds, it would seem nearly everything about the project has changed. While the duo remains the same - Genevieve Ludwig and Erin McCarley - their sound has taken a major shift, pulling away from the sludgy punk of their debut and moving toward a sound more in tune with folk music.
The Silicone Prairie debut set a strange benchmark, an album that felt like brilliantly scattered thoughts brought to life, and things are only getting (delightfully) weirder on Vol. II. Due out July 28th via Feel It Records (It Thing, Sweeping Promises, Private Lives), it’s the type of album where anything feels possible.
The quartet of Ryan Fitzgibbon (US Weekly), Eli Deitz (Dregs, Votive), Steve Pike (Exhalants, CSSS), and Jordan Emmert (Super Thief, Pleasure Venom) bring a great deal of experience together from different pockets of the city’s noise rock and punk scene, the pieces coming together to create something better than the sum of it’s parts.
“Beyond The Darkened Library” is one of the album’s more subdued moments, yet the unnerving energy that Landowner posses is in full force, bleeping and blooping in a way we’d swear was computer driven, yet all praise is due to Dan Shaw, Josh Owsley (bass), Elliot Hughes (guitar), Jeff Gilmartin (guitar), and Josh Daniel (drums).
It’s pretty important to drink a lot of water. It would seem to be a core principle for Glasgow’s Water Machine, one reinforced with art-punk immediacy. Following the band’s self-released demo, the quartet are set to make their “studio” debut with the Raw Liquid Power EP, due out August 4th via Upset The Rhythm
TEKE::TEKE are just getting started, as their upcoming second album, Hagata, takes their already maximalist sound and continues to dig outward. Due out this Friday via Kill Rock Stars, the band sound delightfully unhinged throughout, getting weird and funky, merging disparate sounds at their whim with an orchestrated focus.
At some point Ryan Weinstein’s band Coffin Pricks became the singular Coffin Prick, the project adapting from a band to a solo effort. Weinstein approached his solo debut with patience, building a world unto itself, where vast psychedelic synths are paired together with space-age guitars and a general alien atmosphere.
Robidoux returns with Music For Aluminum Corn, a record composed around his very own corn synth, an instrument built with two touch-controlled aluminum corn cobs. Due out on June 23rd via Crash Symbols, he gives focus to his home-made synth while incorporating manipulated flutes, strings, saxophone, field recordings, and electronic rhythms.
Mo Dotti’s first release since last year’s Guided Imagery comes as part of Stories, a compilation of all-new music from Los Angeles-based queer and PoC artists. As the name implies, Stories aims to compile the “stories we tell and the story we tell when we tell them together” and highlight marginalized voices.
On their forthcoming Crafted Sounds / Michi Tapes LP, Shattered Shine, the maturing quartet grapples with climate doom, political apathy, and the growing pains every late twenty-something must endure. Silver Car Crash dances about, no answers to their grand questions in sight, but enjoying the journey as much as anyone can.
NYC grunge punk power-trio Debbie Dopamine released Pets, a strong EP in the summer of last year, full of noisy and distorted guitars blanketing songs of anxiety. Now they are releasing a video of one of the standout songs "Swimming Pool," reveling in bittersweet and sun-soaked moments of reflection.
