Allegra Krieger sits down at Kiki’s, a cozy and chic Greek restaurant that occupies the end of Division Street, and starts discussing memories of her childhood. Growing up, the singer-songwriter bounced around from state to state, moments from each era fading and binding together with each subsequent move. First, it was Pennsylvania — the suburban structure pales next to the swampiness and underbelly of Florida, her second location. Childhood affects all the ideas you formulate during your adulthood, and Krieger’s music is for the small moments in life, when you find yourself stuck in the woods and can remember the sound of the crickets percolating. “There’s always glimpses of certain domestic moments,” Krieger says. “There’s intimate moments with neighbors. The world is spinning above you as a child, and as I grew older, certain ideas stuck out. What can be chaos can turn into perspective.”

Being a member of one of the defining indie rock bands during the 2010s is a well-deserved confidence booster. A year after the xx released 2017’s I See You, their third album, bandmate and childhood friend Oliver Sim remembered a chat he had with producer Jamie xx about the future when they were teenagers. “I think I’m at peace with the fact that I’m not going to make big waves in the world,” Sim recalled Smith saying. It’s a statement that buzzes with teenage insecurity or foreshadows a cool humility. Whatever the tone, its sentiment was undoubtedly wrong.

The Marathon Petroleum refinery looms over the Boynton neighborhood of Detroit, MI like massive drill bits that cored through the center of the Earth. At night, when the lights on its dozens of towers light up, it resembles an alien electric grid, its red, blue, and white bulbs imprisoned like trapped Tinkerbells within steel beams. A few years ago, the plant was forced to pay an $80,000 fine, plus almost $300,000 in “community investments,” after a broken pipe leaked toxic gas into the lungs and waterways of local residents.

Brian King will consider 2024 a success if Fate & Alcohol is the third-most important thing that happens to him this October. By then, the Japandroids frontman hopes to celebrate one year of sobriety, a milestone as hard-fought as you’d expect for a guy who wrote – and fully embodied – “The Nights Of Wine And Roses” and “Adrenaline Nightshift.” And, as fate would have it, the due date for the fourth and final Japandroids album is the exact same as that of his first child.

On many of the Melvins’ greatest songs, drummer Dale Crover is really the soloist. Listen to the opening drum clatter on “Hooch” that kicks off their landmark 1993 album Houdini, ham-fisted but hyper-precise, a weird architectural construction that takes mere seconds for Crover to build and then topple spectacularly before our eyes. Listen to those woodblock thunks on “Lizzy,” which glint like distant lights in a dark, dismal swamp. The Melvins’ lyrics are famously inscrutable, and there’s the sense in their best music that the drum part is as likely to carry the song’s “meaning” as the words. Crover is such a marvelously expressive drummer that his decision to go kit-to-kit with Big Business’s Coady Willis during the band’s acclaimed late-2000s run scanned as an enormous risk — but taking enormous risks is something the Melvins have been great at for their entire career, from their origins as the slowest band in Montesano, WA to their current status as a beloved cult band whose entire career feels like a wilderness period.

A Love You Cannot Shake, the sophomore album from Fashion Club, starts with a lumbering, stuttering synth impossible to place. Pascal Stevenson tells me the synth is a vocoded, time-stretched kick drum, manipulated and looped in Ableton. That’s just one of many instances I could ask about. Not a moment goes by without something distorted and alien; even the quieter songs feature mangled vocals, pitch shifted in the margins of the mix.

“A straightforward message is not interesting for me,” says Nilüfer Yanya, calling from her home in east London. Yanya punctuates her sentences with her bright laugh or an introspective hmmm and shades in her remarks with a running metacommentary. “I get inspired writing about something that’s a bit less clear.” My Method Actor – Yanya’s third album, released this month – makes good on her belief that the strongest ideas often exist in the in-between. A rumination on slippery but intriguing themes, including memory and nostalgia, the album sees her develop her rich style of storytelling.

“FUCK! FUCK! FUUUUUUUCK!”

Madeline Johnston’s lyrics speak for themselves: “All of my songs are love songs…All of my songs are about death.” This refrain from “Killdozer” on No Depression In Heaven, out today, comes later in the record, after songs about the omnipotence of rock and roll and a funeral dirge for a Toyota Sienna. Johnston’s music as Midwife is simple on the surface but so is mourning. There’s an obvious sadness to a funeral, but there’s also a swelling of emotions inside each mourner, complex and delicate, that aren’t as easy to articulate.

We’ve Got A File On You features interviews in which artists share the stories behind the extracurricular activities that dot their careers: acting gigs, guest appearances, random internet ephemera, etc.

We’ve Got A File On You features interviews in which artists share the stories behind the extracurricular activities that dot their careers: acting gigs, guest appearances, random internet ephemera, etc.

How did you spend your evenings during lockdown? Some people took up prodigious amounts of baking. Others caught up on TV shows they’d neglected or movies they’d missed. I trolled Bandcamp, doing everything I could to fill the void of nighttime DIY shows with discovery of new band after new band. I had a network of friends who did the same, and we’d exchange links to new favorites like hunting trophies.

Few bands experience an evolution as dramatic as Soft Kill’s. The band began with a few records that were sinister and synthy — in the realm of Cold Cave or Drab Majesty — perfecting the sound on their third album, 2016’s hypnotic Choke. Things got more intense and louder with its follow-up, 2018’s Savior, then leaned into more traditional post-punk on 2020’s cheekily titled Dead Kids R.I.P. City, a play on Kendrick Lamar’s good kid, m.A.A.d city. After that, they released a record a year since 2022, each one less predictable than the one before it.

Is playing a show to 13 people in a laundromat worth it? Do Mr. Krabs and Peter Griffin have more musical hot takes? Has the American contemporary experimental music scene lost its edge? Are glitchy hyperpop production, ubiquitous samples, and goofy ’90s pop-rock effective devices for rigorous, high-concept art, or do tongue-in-cheek, doomscroll-evoking sound collages now feel cynical or dated? Is subjecting yourself to the grueling life of a working independent musician a cry for help? A character flaw? A beautifully noble pursuit in this isolating, morally bankrupt world? These are just a handful of the questions raised by Callahan & Witscher’s audacious new LP, Think Differently.

Magdalena Bay are bringing back the heady concept album. Much of contemporary pop music is concerned with past trauma, astrological signs, and capital-V Vulnerability, and it feels like ridiculously conceptual pop music has fallen to the wayside in lieu of self-mythologization and not-so-subtle autobiography. On the other hand, the pop duo comprising Mica Tenenbaum and Matthew Lewin made a record about a character named True, whose body rejects a “disk upgrade” forced into their forehead by aliens, designed to bridge the speculative connections between humans and apes. Or something like that.

When John Davis penned the cocky yet humbling line “Look at me, I can write a melody/ But I can’t expect a soul to care” back in the mid-’90s, he never imagined that the tune in which it appeared would become a song that a lot of people care about.

Twangy indie rock is in full swing this year. Waxahatchee returned with her new album Tigers Blood in March; next month sees the release of Allegra Krieger’s Art Of The Unseen Infinity Machine and MJ Lenderman’s Manning Fireworks. Enter Merce Lemon, a Pittsburgh native whose third LP Watch Me Drive Them Dogs Wild also arrives in September. The sweeping second single “Backyard Lover” is a grief-stricken yet sunlit sprawl bursting with charged guitars and melancholy pedal steel, and lucky for us, the rest of the record is just as compelling.

I’ve always thought of Horse Jumper Of Love songs as charms. To the average person, they appear pretty but mundane; to someone who notices their hidden magic, they’re cosmic and one-of-a-kind. Since their beloved 2016 self-titled debut, the Boston group — made up of vocalist and guitarist Dimitri Giannopoulos, bassist John Margaris, and drummer James Doran — has been a reliable source of enchanting, idiosyncratic slowcore that’s distorted enough to be considered shoegaze. In the past few years, they’ve remained unstoppable; 2022 saw the release of their third studio album Natural Part, 2023 had the mini-album Heartbreak Rules, and now another album titled Disaster Trick is on its way.

Flower Face is more than just a musician. Montreal’s Ruby McKinnon has been building up the mythology around her upcoming album with Polaroids, drink recipes, a loveline, and poems. Girl Prometheus, the follow-up to her 2022 breakthrough The Shark In Your Water, is as intense and magical as its name suggests, containing 10 dynamic songs that explore the extremes of heartbreak and desire.

Beatrice Laus, or Beabadoobee, started out as an indie-rock wunderkind. She was a 17-year-old Pavement and Elliott Smith superfan when her debut single “Coffee” got her signed to Dirty Hit, the label run by the 1975 manager Jamie Oborne; by the time she released her debut album Fake It Flowers two years later in 2020, she was nominated for a Brit Award and had done heavy touring across Europe and North America. The slightly more experimental follow-up Beatopia in 2022 firmed her place in the upper echelons of singer-songwriter pop; most recently, you may have seen her as one of the handpicked openers for Taylor Swift’s US Eras Tour.

We’ve Got A File On You features interviews in which artists share the stories behind the extracurricular activities that dot their careers: acting gigs, guest appearances, random internet ephemera, etc.

Jeff Rosenstock never seems to stop moving. I don’t mean that he’s fidgety or distractable. In fact, he’s overwhelmingly present when you speak to him. He never gets sidetracked or checks his phone. He’s sincerely nice; the word undersells how welcoming his presence is, but it’s the right word.

We’ve Got A File On You features interviews in which artists share the stories behind the extracurricular activities that dot their careers: acting gigs, guest appearances, random internet ephemera, etc.

Every artist has a set of recurring tropes, and for ML Buch it’s a few very specific images: a body falling apart then coming back together again; light bouncing from a reflective surface (particularly glints of sun on the sea). They are regular fixtures across her work, and possibly always will be. “It’s nice to have these eternally, some elements or props or fragments that keep being relevant to me,” she told me recently at a Cuban café in Los Angeles, though she has “no interest in understanding” why she keeps gravitating towards them. It’s been 10 months since she released Suntub, her masterpiece, and she has no interest in understanding that either. “I was singing about the ‘film of sky’, whatever that is,” she said.

French philosopher Georges Bataille wrote in his 1949 essay The Cruel Practice Of Art that art “puts us on the path of complete destruction and suspends us there for a time, [offering] us ravishment without death.” Each song on Martha Skye Murphy’s new album Um inches closer and closer to obliteration. Not only does the London singer-songwriter elude genre, but her music sounds as if it’s echoing from another realm.

We’ve Got A File On You features interviews in which artists share the stories behind the extracurricular activities that dot their careers: acting gigs, guest appearances, random internet ephemera, etc.

We’ve Got A File On You features interviews in which artists share the stories behind the extracurricular activities that dot their careers: acting gigs, guest appearances, random internet ephemera, etc.

We’ve Got A File On You features interviews in which artists share the stories behind the extracurricular activities that dot their careers: acting gigs, guest appearances, random internet ephemera, etc.

“Jesus Christ, I’m 26,” Dan Campbell screamed on the Wonder Years’ “Passing Through A Screen Door,” perhaps the earliest onset of midlife crisis ever captured in pop music. Dedicating one’s life to any kind of band certainly magnifies a sense of arrested development when friends are getting married, having kids, and owning homes, exponentially so when that band plays pop-punk. With COVID and social media accelerationism irrevocably warping our relationship with the passage of time, it’s unsurprising that someone in 2024 can feel like their life is already over by their junior year of college. Having spent nearly half his 20 years immersed in the depths of Wikipedia and Discogs, Holden Wolf admits, “I straight up don’t know how to be normal.” And that panic is the main driver of Combat’s Stay Golden, a classically bombastic pop-punk opus about the futility of existence.

While Aaron Maine talks about the new Porches album Shirt over Zoom, the audio lags, his digitized voice disembodied and misaligned with his video as he lies in bed. It feels like a perfect metaphor for the off-kilter aura of the songs, the glitchy discomfort that makes them alluring. Shirt doesn’t arrive until September, but the compelling singles “Rag,” “Joker,” and “Itch” are enough to prove this thrillingly strange atmosphere. It’s a big leap from his previous material — his strongest stuff yet.

When I’m Called is Jake Xerxes Fussell’s fifth album, but it exists in a stream of musical consciousness that began practically with his birth. Raised by folklorist parents in Columbus, Georgia, the singer and guitarist was inculcated in a social circle that included luminaries like George Mitchell and Art Rosenbaum, the latter of whom took a young Fussell under his wing. Traditional music, folk art, field recording, local history — all were a routine part of his upbringing, as ordinary as little-league baseball or summer camp. “My parents never forced any of that stuff on me,” Fussell is quick to note. “I was just exposed to it.”

Ben Seretan can’t just go around calling Allora his “insane Italy record” without elaborating on both the “insane” and “Italy” part. “It’s kind of a long story,” he sighs – not the “it’s kind of a long story” used as a deflection when the teller knows both they and the listener will be bored out of their minds if recall lasts more than 15 seconds. The earliest iteration of Allora’s electrifying krautrock freakout “New Air” dates back to 2012, when Seretan was just one of many “DIY idiots living in Bushwick” trying to make the scene at 285 Kent and Glasslands. In the time since, there has been unexpected indie fame in the Alpine region of Europe, scammy booking agents, life-altering breakups, devastating deaths, 24-hour ambient albums, a rousing breakthrough released into the gaping maw of early COVID, demolition derbies, dairy farm drag parties, outdoor raves and naked barn dances. Fittingly enough, the story ends in a place called Climax, New York.

In Cormac McCarthy’s 2017 essay “The Kekulé Problem,” the late novelist defines the subconscious as “a machine for operating an animal.” He goes into detail about the German organic chemist August Kekulé, who was puzzled over the molecular structure for benzene until Kekulé’s dreams solved it for him. In his sleep, a visual representation materialized: an ouroboros, a snake perpetually feeding on its own tail. According to McCarthy, the scientist awoke with a start, saying to himself: “It’s a ring. The molecule is in the form of a ring.” It leads the author to wonder, “Why is the unconscious so loath to speak to us?” Broken down to its core components, the subconscious is pure impulse with no potential hindrances. It’s instinct. A pure gut feeling.

Eliza McLamb’s face on the cover of her debut album Going Through It is a bit blurry under a layer of water and a cluster of bubbles rippling outward across the surface of the pond. It’s unclear whether she’s going under or coming up for air — an ambiguity that parallels the two tracks that bookend the record. There’s the wide-eyed, childlike curiosity of “Before,” which acts as a sort of prologue to McLamb’s bildungsroman arc, and the half-asleep haze of closer “To Wake Up,” which finds peace and clarity in “unremarkable days” in the wake of a stormy coming-of-age journey.

When we last heard from Peel Dream Magazine, Joe Stevens had basically soft rebooted the project. During the group’s New York years, Peel Dream had been Stevens’ vehicle for exploring a host of moodier psychedelic traditions, from krautrock to shoegaze. During the pandemic, he decamped to Los Angeles, and in 2022 he re-emerged with Pad — a concept album about him getting kicked out of his own band, now set to jazz- and country-tinged baroque-pop fixated on ’60s harmonies and Beach Boys melodies. Now, another two years down the road, Stevens is set to return with Rose Main Reading Room. It’s his first release for Topshelf Records, and, once more, it’s a whole new Peel Dream Magazine.

“Could you ever live anywhere but New York?” I am sometimes asked, by people who know that I have spent more than three decades in the city that may occasionally sleep but which never gets less expensive. My response is usually, “Probably, but I could live without a limb or two as well.” Being here is that important to me. I am a sucker for songs and videos that evoke the place: Interpol’s eternal “NYC” – “The subway is a porno, the pavements they are a mess” — or Vampire Weekend’s lyric video for “Step,” with its images of Astor Place and Washington Square Park, my college-days stomping grounds.

Solid Sound is not like other festivals. It’s at an art museum: the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, in North Adams, MA. It’s relatively small, with a capacity of about 8,000 people per day. And it’s entirely centered around Wilco – not just as the headliners, but as hosts and curators. It’s a festival as a sonic dinner party, with the band giving its fans not just its own music but other artists its members want to share with everyone. This year that includes Jason Isbell And The 400 Unit as the second headliner, as well as such bands as Dry Cleaning, Nick Lowe and Los Straitjackets, Ratboys, Iris Dement and Water From Your Eyes.

To borrow a tired refrain from the early COVID era, we’re now living through ~unprecedented times~. A former US president was convicted of 34 felonies. AI is ruining the internet. And a one-man slam-metal band influenced by avant-garde classical and free jazz, whose War On Terror-themed music has no lyrics and is sung by a drummer strapped with a headset microphone, are now the hottest new band in hardcore.

We’ve Got A File On You features interviews in which artists share the stories behind the extracurricular activities that dot their careers: acting gigs, guest appearances, random internet ephemera, etc.