Dead Oceans Rock & Indie 129 Items

Food for Worms, their explosive third record, sees shame enter a new, surreal landscape, as reflected in the cover art designed by acclaimed artist Marcel Dzama. It's suggestive of what is left unsaid, what lies beneath the surface, the farcical and fantastical everyday that we are living in, in a society where both everything and nothing is possible. On the one hand, new album Food for Worms calls to mind a certain morbidity, but on the other, it's a celebration of life; the way that, in the end, we need each other. The album is an ode to friendship, and a documentation of the dynamic that only five people who have grown up together - and grown so close, against all odds - can share. For the first time, the band are not delving inwards, but seeking to capture the world around them. Now they arrive, finally, at a place of hard-won maturity. Enter: Food for Worms, which singer Charlie Steen declares to be "the Lamborghini of shame records." The album crashed into life faster than anything they'd created before. The band recorded it while playing festivals all over Europe. That live energy, what it's like to witness shame in their element, is captured perfectly on record - like lightning in a bottle. The album marks a sonic departure: shame have abandoned their post-punk beginnings for far more eclectic influences, drawing from the sharp yet uncomplicated lyrical observations of Lou Reed and the more melodic works of 90s German band, Blumfeld. They called upon renowned producer Flood (Nick Cave, U2, PJ Harvey, Foals) to execute their vision. Recording each track live meant a kind of surrender: here, the rough edges give the album its texture; the mistakes are more interesting than perfection. In a way, it harks back to the title itself and the way that with this record, the band are embracing frailty and by doing so, are tapping into a new source of bravery.

Bill Fay has always sung about attempting to understand themost universal questions: those of nature, spirituality, humanity. His songs are "calming hymns for another chaotic time", he says. His influence can be traced through many artist's work, and so it only seemed right to celebrate this with a collection of newer voices interpreting his timeless tracks. Originally released in 2010 by David Tibet (Current 93), Still Some Light was released as a double CD, made up of 70's album demos (Disc One) and 2009 home recordings (Disc Two). This year, for the first time, this collection of recordings will be pressed to vinyl and released digitally, presented alongside contemporary reimaginings of the tracks by Kevin Morby, Steve Gunn, Julia Jacklin and...

Bill Fay has always sung about attempting to understand the most universal questions: those of nature, spirituality, humanity. His songs are "calming hymns for another chaotic time", he says. His influence can be traced through many artist's work, and so it only seemed right to celebrate this with a collection of newer voices interpreting his timeless tracks. Originally released in 2010 by David Tibet (Current 93), Still Some Light was released as a double CD, made up of 70's album demos (Disc One) and 2009 home recordings (Disc Two). This year, for the first time, this collection of recordings will be pressed to vinyl and released digitally, presented alongside contemporary reimaginings of the tracks by Kevin Morby, Steve Gunn, Julia Jacklin and Mary Lattimore. Bill Fay's words and melodies remain unaffected by the passing of time and changing trends; and here alongside the original recordings, these reinvented versions still calmly guide us through another moment of chaos. Bill Fay's Still Some Light was originally released on compact disc as a two CD collection in 2010. Reimagined with new artwork and available for the first time ever on vinyl, Dead Oceans is pleased to present Still Some Light Pt. 1, collecting Fay's archival recordings from 1970 and 1971. Many of the songs are intimate sketches which were eventually re-recorded for Fay's self-titled debut and for his landmark album, Time of the Last Persecution. This double LP set includes heart wrenching versions of some of his timeless works, such as "I Hear You Calling" and "Pictures of Adolf Again", and features equally powerful songs like "Arnold is a Simple Man" and "Love is the Tune," which only appear in this collection.

Shame follow up their wildly acclaimed debut with a James Ford-produced peek into the riddled mind of the band's frontman, Charlie Steen. There are moments on Drunk Tank Pink where you almost have to reach for the sleeve to check this is the same band who made 2018's Songs Of Praise. Such is the jump Shame have made from the riotous post-punk of their debut to the sprawling adventurism and twitching anxieties laid out here. The South Londoner's blood and guts spirit, that wink and grin of devious charm, is still present, it's just that it's grown into something bigger, something deeper, more ambitious and unflinchingly honest. The genius of Drunk Tank Pink is how these lyrical themes dovetail with the music. Opener Alphabet dissects the premise of performance over a siren call of nervous, jerking guitars, its chorus thrown out like a beer bottle across a mosh pit. Songs spin off and lurch into unexpected directions throughout here, be it March Day's escalating aural panic attack or the shapeshifting darkness of Snow Day. There's a Berlin era Bowie beauty to the lovelorn Human For A Minute while closer Station Wagon weaves from a downbeat mooch into a souring, soullifting climax in which Steen elevates himself beyond the clouds and into the heavens. Or at least that's what it sounds like. From the womb to the clouds (sort of), Shame are currently very much in the pink.

Ask Mitski Miyawaki about happiness and she'll warn you: "Happiness fucks you." It's a lesson that's been writ large into the New Yorker's gritty, outsider-indie for years, but never so powerfully as on her newest album, 'Puberty 2'. "Happiness is up, sadness is down, but one's almost more destructive than the other," she says. "When you realise you can't have one without the other, it's possible to spend periods of happiness just waiting for that other wave." On 'Puberty 2', that tension is palpable: a both beautiful and brutal romantic hinterland, in which one of America's new voices hits a brave new stride.

A gorgeous and gripping portrait of Fenne's last two years, Big Picture was pieced together in an effort to self-soothe. Tracked live in co-producer Brad Cook's North Carolina studio, the album delineates the phases of love and becomes a map of comfort vs claustrophobia. Though its creation took place amid personal and global turmoil, the ruminative yet candid Big Picture is Fenne's most cohesive, resolute work to date, both lyrically and sonically. "This isn't a sad album _ it's about as uplifting as my way of doing things will allow," she says. "These songs explore worry and doubt and letting go, but those themes are framed brightly." With confidence and quiet strength, each track provides an insight into Fenne's ever-changing view of love and, ultimately, its redefinition _ love as a process, not something to be lost and found. While the album was written alone in Fenne's Bristol flat - a fact intentionally reflected in its compact sonic quality - Big Picture was transformed from a solitary venture into a unifying collaboration during the recording process when she was joined by her touring band, Melina Dutere of Jay Som (mixing), Christian Lee Hutson (guitar and co production), and Katy Kirby (vocals). Notably, these 10 songs are Fenne's first and only to have been written over the course of a relationship; 2018's On Hold and 2020's Breach both confront the pain of retrospection, saying goodbye to a love that's gone. Big Picture does the exact opposite _ rooted firmly in the present, it traces the narrative of two people trying their hardest not to implode, together. "This album is an observation of the way I think about love, the selfexamination that comes with closeness and the responsibilities involved in being a big part of someone else's small(er) world," summarizes Fenne. "It was written in a place of relative emotional stability - stability that felt unstable because of its newness, but also because of the global context. 2020 was the year of letting go, but we'd all already let go of so much and nothing felt like mine anymore. Writing always did, though, so that's what I chose to do."

Toro y Moi's seventh studio album, Mahal, is the boldest and most fascinating journey yet from musical mastermind Chaz Bear. The record spans genre and sound_encompassing the shaggy psychedelic rock of the 1960s and `70s, and the airy sounds of 1990s mod-post-rock_taking listeners on an auditory expedition, as if they're riding in the back of Bear's Filipino jeepney that adorns the album's cover. But Mahal is also an unmistakably Toro y Moi experience, calling back to previous works while charting a new path forward in a way that only Bear can do. Mahal is the latest in an accomplished career for Bear, who's undoubtedly one of the decade's most influential musicians. Since the release of the electronic pop landmark Causers of This in 2009, subsequent records as Toro y Moi have repeatedly shifted the idea of what his sound can be. But there's little in Bear's catalog that will prepare you for the deep-groove excursions on Mahal, his most eclectic record to date. The second the album begins we're immediately transported into the passenger seat, jeep sounds and all, ready for the ride Chaz and company have concocted for us. Seeds of some of Mahal's 13 songs date back to the more explicitly rock-oriented What For? from 2015. Mahal was mostly completed last year in Bear's Oakland studio with the involvement of a host of collaborators, Sofie Royer and Unknown Mortal Orchestra's Ruban Neilson to Neon Indian's Alan Palomo and the Mattson 2. "I wanted to make a record that featured more musicians on it than any other record of mine," he explains. "To have them live on that record feels grounded, bringing a communal perspective to the table." As a result, Mahal is lush and surprising at every turn, from the cool-handed "The Loop," which recalls Sly and the Family Stones, to the elastic psych rock of "Foreplay" and the dizzying Mulatu Astatke-recalling of "Last Year." Lyrically, the album zooms in on generational concerns, picking up where the Outer Peace standout "Freelance" effectively left off. Bear seems to be surveying the ways in which we connect with technology, media, each other, and what disappears as a result. Cuts like the squishy "Postman" and the "Magazine" take a deep dive into our relationship with media in a changing digital world. "It's interesting to see how we adapt to this new age. We're so connected, but we're still missing out on things," Bear ruminates while discussing the album's themes. It's not all introspection. Bear cools things down near the album's end with the Mattson 2-featuring "Millennium," a laid-back jam with tricky guitar licks about ringing in new times even when everything else seems upside down. "It's about enjoying the new year, even when it's been shitty," Bear explains. "There's nothing else to do." Finding a sense of joy in the face of adversity is embedded in Mahal's DNA, right down to the jeepney that literally and figuratively brings the music out into the community. "We know that touring is messed up for now, and large gatherings are a fluke," he explains. "It's about the notion of us going out to the people and bringing the record to them." And with the wide-open atmosphere of Mahal, Toro y Moi stands to connect with more listeners than ever before.

Copycat Killer is a 12" featuring 4 exclusive new versions of songs from Phoebe Bridgers' wildly acclaimed Punisher album. Collaborating with arranger Rob Moose (Sufjan Stevens, The National, Bon Iver, Vampire Weekend, Jay-Z), these are brand new orchestral arrangements of the songs Kyoto, Savior Complex, Chinese Satellite and Punisher, all given a luscious revamp that is sure to delight any fans of Phoebe's album and serve as perfect gateway for new listeners into what makes her one of the most special artists of 2020 and beyond.

Since releasing Bury Me at Makeout Creek in November 2014, Mitsku has received international acclaim for her distinct, arresting sound and profoundly reflective lyrics.

Food for Worms, their explosive third record, sees shame enter a new, surreal landscape, as reflected in the cover art designed by acclaimed artist Marcel Dzama. It's suggestive of what is left unsaid, what lies beneath the surface, the farcical and fantastical everyday that we are living in, in a society where both everything and nothing is possible. On the one hand, new album Food for Worms calls to mind a certain morbidity, but on the other, it's a celebration of life; the way that, in the end, we need each other. The album is an ode to friendship, and a documentation of the dynamic that only five people who have grown up together - and grown so close, against all odds - can share. For the first time, the band are not delving inwards, but seeking to capture the world around them. Now they arrive, finally, at a place of hard-won maturity. Enter: Food for Worms, which singer Charlie Steen declares to be "the Lamborghini of shame records." The album crashed into life faster than anything they'd created before. The band recorded it while playing festivals all over Europe. That live energy, what it's like to witness shame in their element, is captured perfectly on record - like lightning in a bottle. The album marks a sonic departure: shame have abandoned their post-punk beginnings for far more eclectic influences, drawing from the sharp yet uncomplicated lyrical observations of Lou Reed and the more melodic works of 90s German band, Blumfeld. They called upon renowned producer Flood (Nick Cave, U2, PJ Harvey, Foals) to execute their vision. Recording each track live meant a kind of surrender: here, the rough edges give the album its texture; the mistakes are more interesting than perfection. In a way, it harks back to the title itself and the way that with this record, the band are embracing frailty and by doing so, are tapping into a new source of bravery.

New Zealand's Marlon Williams has quite simply got one of the most extraordinary, effortlessly distinctive voices of his generation-a fact well known to fans of his first, self-titled solo album, and his captivating live shows. An otherworldly instrument with an affecting vibrato, it's a voice that's earned repeated comparisons to the great Roy Orbison, and even briefly had Williams, in his youth, consider a career in classical singing, before realizing his temperament was more Stratocaster than Stradivarius. But it's the art of songwriting that has bedeviled the artist, and into which he has grown exponentially on his second album, Make Way For Love, out in February of 2018. It's Marlon Williams like you've never heard him before-exploring new musical terrain and revealing himself in an unprecedented way, in the wake of a fractured relationship. In early December, Williams and his longtime girlfriend, musician Aldous (Hannah) Harding, broke up. While personally wrenching, the split seemed to open the floodgates for Williams as a writer. "_I wrote about fifteen songs in a month," he recalls. Sure enough, while Make Way For Love draws on Williams' own story, in remarkably universal terms it captures the vagaries of relationships that we've all been through: he bliss (opener "Come To Me"); ache ("Love Is a Terrible Thing"); nagging questions ("Can I Call You"); and bitterness ("The Fire Of Love", whose lyrics Williams says he "agonized over" more than any). And there's "Nobody Gets What They Want Anymore", a duet with Harding, recorded after the two broke up, with Williams directing Harding's recording via a late-night long distance phone call. "We finally got to talk it out," he adds. "We still love each other very much."If "breakup record" is a trope-and certainly it is-then Marlon Williams has done it proud. Like the best of the lot, Make Way For Love doesn't shy away from heartbreak, but rather stares it in the face, and mines beauty from it.

Sometimes, Mitski says, it feels like life would be easier without hope, or a soul, or love. But when she closes her eyes and thinks about what's truly hers, what can't be repossessed or demolished, she sees love. "The best thing I ever did in my life was to love people," Mitski says. "I wish I could leave behind all the love I have, after I die, so that I can shine all this goodness, all this good love that I've created onto other people." She hopes her newest album, The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We, will continue to shine that love long after she's gone. Listening to it, that's precisely how it feels: like a love that's haunting the land. "This is my most American album," Mitski says about her seventh record, and the music feels like a profound act of witnessing this country, in all of its private sorrows and painful contradictions. In this album, which is sonically Mitski's most expansive, epic, and wise, the songs seem to be introducing wounds and then actively healing them. Here, love is time- traveling to bless our tender days, like the light from a distant star. The album is full of the ache of the grown- up, seemingly mundane heartbreaks and joys that are often unsung but feel enormous. It's a tiny epic. From the bottom of a glass, to a driveway slushy with memory and snow, to a freight train barreling through the Midwest, and all the way to the moon, it feels like everything, and everyone, is crying out, screaming in pain, arching towards love. Love is that inhospitable land, beckoning us and then rejecting us. To love this place _ this earth, this America, this body _ takes active work. It might be impossible. The best things are.

A Wednesday song is a quilt. A short story collection, a half-memory, a patchwork of portraits of the American south, disparate moments that somehow make sense as a whole. Karly Hartzman, the songwriter/ vocalist/guitarist at the helm of the project, is a story collector as much as she is a storyteller: a scholar of people and one-liners. Rat Saw God, the Asheville quintet's new and best record, is ekphrastic but autobiographical and above all, deeply empathetic. Across the album's ten tracks Hartzman, guitarist MJ Lenderman, bassist Margo Shultz, drummer Alan Miller, and lap/pedal steel player Xandy Chelmis build a shrine to minutiae. Half-funny, half-tragic dispatches from North Carolina unfurling somewhere between the wailing skuzz of Nineties shoegaze and classic country twang, that distorted lap steel and Hartzman's voice slicing through the din. Rat Saw God is an album about riding a bike down a suburban stretch in Greensboro while listening to My Bloody Valentine for the first time on an iPod Nano, past a creek that runs through the neighborhood riddled with broken glass bottles and condoms, a front yard filled with broken and rusted car parts, a lonely and dilapidated house reclaimed by kudzu. Four Lokos and rodeo clowns and a kid who burns down a corn field. Roadside monuments, church marquees, poppers and vodka in a plastic water bottle, the shit you get away with at Jewish summer camp, strange sentimental family heirlooms at the thrift stores. The way the South hums alive all night in the summers and into fall, the sound of high school football games, the halo effect from the lights polluting the darkness. It's not really bright enough to see in front of you, but in that stretch of inky void - somehow - you see everything. The songs on Rat Saw God don't recount epics, just the everyday. They're true, they're real life, blurry and chaotic and strange - which is in-line with Hartzman's own ethos: "Everyone's story is worthy," she says, plainly. "Literally every life story is worth writing down, because people are so fascinating." But the thing about Rat Saw God - and about any Wednesday song, really - is you don't necessarily even need all the references to get it, the weirdly specific elation of a song that really hits. Yeah, it's all in the details - how fucked up you got or get, how you break a heart, how you fall in love, how you make yourself and others feel seen - but it's mostly the way those tiny moments add up into a song or album or a person.

2022 Dead Oceans' reissue of the second album by indie rock band Bright Eyes. Letting Off the Happiness was orginially released on November 2, 1998. It was the first release by Bright Eyes to feature and be produced by Mike Mogis, now a permanent member of the band. Guest musicians include members of Cursive, Tilly and the Wall, and Elephant 6 collective's Neutral Milk Hotel and of Montreal.

Dead Oceans' 2022 reissue of the debut album by Bright Eyes. A Collection of Songs Written and Recorded 1995-1997 was the first commercial release by Conor Oberst and features his vocals and guitar. The album saw Oberst beginning to experiment with drum machines, keyboards and other instruments. The sound of the album ranges from bleating vocals to acoustic guitar songs and techno-style synthesizer instrumentals.

Toro y Moi's seventh studio album, Mahal, is the boldest and most fascinating journey yet from musical mastermind Chaz Bear. The record spans genre and sound_encompassing the shaggy psychedelic rock of the 1960s and `70s, and the airy sounds of 1990s mod-post-rock_taking listeners on an auditory expedition, as if they're riding in the back of Bear's Filipino jeepney that adorns the album's cover. But Mahal is also an unmistakably Toro y Moi experience, calling back to previous works while charting a new path forward in a way that only Bear can do. Mahal is the latest in an accomplished career for Bear, who's undoubtedly one of the decade's most influential musicians. Since the release of the electronic pop landmark Causers of This in 2009, subsequent records as Toro y Moi have repeatedly shifted the idea of what his sound can be. But there's little in Bear's catalog that will prepare you for the deep-groove excursions on Mahal, his most eclectic record to date. The second the album begins we're immediately transported into the passenger seat, jeep sounds and all, ready for the ride Chaz and company have concocted for us. Seeds of some of Mahal's 13 songs date back to the more explicitly rock-oriented What For? from 2015. Mahal was mostly completed last year in Bear's Oakland studio with the involvement of a host of collaborators, Sofie Royer and Unknown Mortal Orchestra's Ruban Neilson to Neon Indian's Alan Palomo and the Mattson 2. "I wanted to make a record that featured more musicians on it than any other record of mine," he explains. "To have them live on that record feels grounded, bringing a communal perspective to the table." As a result, Mahal is lush and surprising at every turn, from the cool-handed "The Loop," which recalls Sly and the Family Stones, to the elastic psych rock of "Foreplay" and the dizzying Mulatu Astatke-recalling of "Last Year." Lyrically, the album zooms in on generational concerns, picking up where the Outer Peace standout "Freelance" effectively left off. Bear seems to be surveying the ways in which we connect with technology, media, each other, and what disappears as a result. Cuts like the squishy "Postman" and the "Magazine" take a deep dive into our relationship with media in a changing digital world. "It's interesting to see how we adapt to this new age. We're so connected, but we're still missing out on things," Bear ruminates while discussing the album's themes. It's not all introspection. Bear cools things down near the album's end with the Mattson 2-featuring "Millennium," a laid-back jam with tricky guitar licks about ringing in new times even when everything else seems upside down. "It's about enjoying the new year, even when it's been shitty," Bear explains. "There's nothing else to do." Finding a sense of joy in the face of adversity is embedded in Mahal's DNA, right down to the jeepney that literally and figuratively brings the music out into the community. "We know that touring is messed up for now, and large gatherings are a fluke," he explains. "It's about the notion of us going out to the people and bringing the record to them." And with the wide-open atmosphere of Mahal, Toro y Moi stands to connect with more listeners than ever before.

A gorgeous and gripping portrait of Fenne's last two years, Big Picture was pieced together in an effort to self-soothe. Tracked live in co-producer Brad Cook's North Carolina studio, the album delineates the phases of love and becomes a map of comfort vs claustrophobia. Though its creation took place amid personal and global turmoil, the ruminative yet candid Big Picture is Fenne's most cohesive, resolute work to date, both lyrically and sonically. "This isn't a sad album _ it's about as uplifting as my way of doing things will allow," she says. "These songs explore worry and doubt and letting go, but those themes are framed brightly." With confidence and quiet strength, each track provides an insight into Fenne's ever-changing view of love and, ultimately, its redefinition _ love as a process, not something to be lost and found. While the album was written alone in Fenne's Bristol flat - a fact intentionally reflected in its compact sonic quality - Big Picture was transformed from a solitary venture into a unifying collaboration during the recording process when she was joined by her touring band, Melina Dutere of Jay Som (mixing), Christian Lee Hutson (guitar and co production), and Katy Kirby (vocals). Notably, these 10 songs are Fenne's first and only to have been written over the course of a relationship; 2018's On Hold and 2020's Breach both confront the pain of retrospection, saying goodbye to a love that's gone. Big Picture does the exact opposite _ rooted firmly in the present, it traces the narrative of two people trying their hardest not to implode, together. "This album is an observation of the way I think about love, the selfexamination that comes with closeness and the responsibilities involved in being a big part of someone else's small(er) world," summarizes Fenne. "It was written in a place of relative emotional stability - stability that felt unstable because of its newness, but also because of the global context. 2020 was the year of letting go, but we'd all already let go of so much and nothing felt like mine anymore. Writing always did, though, so that's what I chose to do."

Fenne was born in London and moved to Dorset as a toddler, where she grew up in the picturesque English countryside. She was a "free range kid," as she calls it, after her parents took her out of school for a period at the age of seven. Over the following year, they taught her while the family travelled Europe in a live-in bus. Even after she returned to traditional school at 9, her home education never ended, extending to music. Her mother gifted Fenne with her old record collection, through which she discovered her love for T-Rex and the Velvet Underground and Nico. Soon after she fell for the strange genius of PJ Harvey and came to worship Nick Drake, Joni Mitchell, and the richly crafted worlds of Feist, which inspired Fenne to pick up a guitar. "On Hold," a tender collection of expressive, open-hearted songs, was Fenne's first foray into songwriting, written during her teenage years. Writing her own songs was initially a "therapy exercise" for Fenne, who is normally reserved when it comes to talking about her feelings. The album, self-released in 2018, organically found a large audience online, which grew after she opened for Lucy Dacus and Andy Shauf's North American tours last spring. Surrounding its release, The Line of Best Fit deemed Fenne "a new and extraordinary voice capable of wringing profound and resonant moments out of loss." In Fenne's words, "To have this record physically rereleased is a big deal for me and the person I was when I made it. A lot's changed since then but these songs and what they've given me will remain dependable reminders of beginnings and endings that shaped me as a teenager. For an album whose title is half `hold', it makes sense that now whoever wants to can finally do that again."

Isolation is nothing new for Fenne Lily - in fact, she's Written an album of songs all about it. "It's kind of like writing a letter, and leaving it in a book that you know you'll get out when you're sad - like a message to yourself in the future," she says, referring to Breach, her Dead Oceans debut she wrote during a period of self-enforced isolation pre-COVID. It's an expansive, diaristic, frequently sardonic record that deals with the mess and the catharsis of entering your 20s and finding peace while being alone. "I think this record is proof that I can be emotionally stable, even if right now I feel a little bit up and down," says Fenne. "There's the ability to find clarity in that. It's sobering, weirdly." Fenne was born in London and moved to Dorset as a toddler, where she grew up in the picturesque English countryside. She was a "free range kid," as she calls it, after her parents took her out of school for a period at the age of seven. Over the following year, they taught her while the family travelled Europe in a live-in bus. Even after she returned to traditional school at 9, her home education never ended, extending to music. Her mother gifted Fenne with her old record collection, through which she discovered her love for T-Rex and the Velvet Underground and Nico. Soon after she fell for the strange Genius of PJ Harvey and came to worship Nick Drake, Joni Mitchell, and the richly crafted worlds of Feist, which inspired Fenne to pick up a guitar. It's that journey to find peace inside herself that underpins the whole of Fenne's second album. Its title, Breach, occurred to Fenne after deep conversations with her mum about her birth, during which she was breech, or upside down in the womb. The slippery double-sidedness of the word - which, spelled with an "A", means to "break through" - drew her in. "That feels like what I was doing in this record; I was breaking through a wall that I built for myself, keeping myself safe, and dealing with the downside of feeling lonely and alone. I realized that I am comfortable in myself, and I don't need to fixate on relationships to make myself feel like I have something to talk about. I felt like I broke through a mental barrier in that respect." Even though it also carries implications of awkwardness, rebellion, and breakage, it's a widereaching word, representing new beginnings and birth.

We don't typically look to pop albums to answer our cultural moment, let alone to meet the soul hunger left in the wake of global catastrophe. But occasionally, an artist proves the form more malleable and capacious than we knew. With Laurel Hell, Mitski cements her reputation as an artist in possession of such power - capable of using her talent to perform the alchemy that turns our most savage and alienated experiences into the very elixir that cures them. Her critically beloved last album, Be the Cowboy, built on the breakout acclaim of 2016's Puberty 2 and launched her from cult favorite to indie star. She ascended amid a fever of national division, and the grind of touring and pitfalls of increased visibility influenced her music as much as her spirit. Like the mountain laurels for this new album is named, public perception, like the intoxicating prism of the internet, can offer an alluring façade that obscures a deadly trap _ one that tightens the more you struggle. Exhausted by this warped mirror, and our addiction to false binaries, she began writing songs that stripped away the masks and revealed the complex and often contradictory realities behind them. She wrote many of these songs during or before 2018, while the album finished mixing in May 2021. It is the longest span of time Mitski has ever spent on a record, and a process that concluded amid a radically changed world. She recorded Laurel Hell with her longtime producer Patrick Hyland throughout the isolation of a global pandemic, during which some of the songs "slowly took on new forms and meanings, like seed to flower." Sometimes it's hard to see the change when you're the agent of it, but for the lucky rest of us, Mitski has written a soundtrack for transformation, a map to the place where vulnerability and resilience, sorrow and delight, error and transcendence can all sit within our humanity, can all be seen as worthy of acknowledgment, and ultimately, love.

A Wednesday song is a quilt. A short story collection, a half-memory, a patchwork of portraits of the American south, disparate moments that somehow make sense as a whole. Karly Hartzman, the songwriter/ vocalist/guitarist at the helm of the project, is a story collector as much as she is a storyteller: a scholar of people and one-liners. Rat Saw God, the Asheville quintet's new and best record, is ekphrastic but autobiographical and above all, deeply empathetic. Across the album's ten tracks Hartzman, guitarist MJ Lenderman, bassist Margo Shultz, drummer Alan Miller, and lap/pedal steel player Xandy Chelmis build a shrine to minutiae. Half-funny, half-tragic dispatches from North Carolina unfurling somewhere between the wailing skuzz of Nineties shoegaze and classic country twang, that distorted lap steel and Hartzman's voice slicing through the din. Rat Saw God is an album about riding a bike down a suburban stretch in Greensboro while listening to My Bloody Valentine for the first time on an iPod Nano, past a creek that runs through the neighborhood riddled with broken glass bottles and condoms, a front yard filled with broken and rusted car parts, a lonely and dilapidated house reclaimed by kudzu. Four Lokos and rodeo clowns and a kid who burns down a corn field. Roadside monuments, church marquees, poppers and vodka in a plastic water bottle, the shit you get away with at Jewish summer camp, strange sentimental family heirlooms at the thrift stores. The way the South hums alive all night in the summers and into fall, the sound of high school football games, the halo effect from the lights polluting the darkness. It's not really bright enough to see in front of you, but in that stretch of inky void - somehow - you see everything. The songs on Rat Saw God don't recount epics, just the everyday. They're true, they're real life, blurry and chaotic and strange - which is in-line with Hartzman's own ethos: "Everyone's story is worthy," she says, plainly. "Literally every life story is worth writing down, because people are so fascinating." But the thing about Rat Saw God - and about any Wednesday song, really - is you don't necessarily even need all the references to get it, the weirdly specific elation of a song that really hits. Yeah, it's all in the details - how fucked up you got or get, how you break a heart, how you fall in love, how you make yourself and others feel seen - but it's mostly the way those tiny moments add up into a song or album or a person.

Lifted or The Story Is in the Soil, Keep Your Ear to the Ground Originally released 2002. "The first three are innocent in a way, because we didn't have an audience when we were making them," Oberst says. "But from Lifted on, I was definitely aware of an audience. Lifted was well-received right away, and then everything happened with Wide Awake and Digital Ash." Those two albums came out simultaneously. And their lead singles - "Take It Easy (Love Nothing)," from the austere, remote Digital Ash, and "Lua," from the warm, folky Wide Awake - debuted in the top two slots on the Billboard Hot 100. "First Day of My Life," also from Wide Awake, would later be voted the Number One love song of all time by NPR Music's reader's poll. Bright Eyes had officially broken through. It was a heady, exciting time, but also fraughtand tense, both because of the band's careening new fame, and because of the state of the world. When Bright Eyes made their Tonight Show debut in 2006, they chose to perform none of their shiny new hits, instead delivering a searing, harrowing rendition of their caustic anti-Bush anthem, "When The President Talks To God." These days, Oberst is still amusing himself by messing with the extremes Bright Eyes baked into this

LP version comes with download of the album."There's No Leaving Now", the newest record from Kristian Matsson's aptly titled moniker, The Tallest Man On Earth, finds the Swedish troubadour trading in the sense of urgency that fueled his first two records for a confidently relaxed approach. The results are paralyzing. Drums, piano, baritone guitar, woodwinds and pedal steel layer this collection of songs that never compromise virtuosity for immediacy. The songwriting is every bit as detailed and captivating as his previous work, but this time around, Matsson is showing a few more cards. The music of the Tallest Man on Earth has traditionally centered around the power of performance and has served as a reminder that directness is the best course of action. However,...

"The first three are innocent in a way, because we didn't have an audience when we were making them," Oberst says. "But from Lifted on, I was definitely aware of an audience. Lifted was well-received right away, and then everything happened with Wide Awake and Digital Ash." Those two albums came out simultaneously. And their lead singles - "Take It Easy (Love Nothing)," from the austere, remote Digital Ash, and "Lua," from the warm, folky Wide Awake - debuted in the top two slots on the Billboard Hot 100. "First Day of My Life," also from Wide Awake, would later be voted the Number One love song of all time by NPR Music's reader's poll. Bright Eyes had officially broken through. It was a heady, exciting time, but also fraughtand tense, both because of the band's careening new fame, and because of the state of the world. When Bright Eyes made their Tonight Show debut in 2006, they chose to perform none of their shiny new hits, instead delivering a searing, harrowing rendition of their caustic anti-Bush anthem, "When The President Talks To God."

Durand Jones's Wait `Til I Get Over is a memoir and a love letter. It is the story of Jones's life, his growth and revelations, the wisdom of his hometown and the wisdom he could only gain once he left. In it, he writes through Hillaryville's contradictions: the pristine beauty and the ragged roads; his teenage desire to leave and his adult desire to honor his tangled roots; the plantation history and the ups and downs of the Black community that made homes of this reparation town. "Hometowns have a way of keeping a part of you," says Jones, "and if I'm making something young-me would be proud of, Hillaryville is a big part of that." Jones finds something transformative in his memories there and the life he has led since, ultimately claiming and embracing his whole self. The result is vulnerable, personal, touching on Jones's relationship to church life, to his mother, to his queerness, to his worth. "I wish I could tell my younger self `you don't have to stick to the dreams people have for you,'" says Jones, "'you can dream bigger. You are more than capable, you are more than able. I think about some nerdy punk kid in the rural south who needs to hear that now.'" Wait `Til I Get Over does exactly that.

The story begins with Kevin Morby absentmindedly flipping through a box of old family photos in the basement of his childhood home in Kansas City. Just hours before, at a family dinner, his father had collapsed in front of him and had to be rushed to the hospital. That night Morby still felt the shock and fear lodged in his bones. So he gazed at the images until one of the pictures jumped out at him: his father as a young man, proud and strong and filled with confidence, posing on a lawn with his shirt off. This was in January of 2020. As the months went on and the world dramatically changed around him, Morby felt an eerie similarity between his feelings of that night and the atmosphere of those spring days. Fear, anxiety, hope and resilience all churning together. The themes began twisting in his mind. History, trauma and the grand fight against time. Having the courage to dream, even while knowing the tragedy that often awaits those who dare to dream. While his father regained his strength, Morby meditated on these ideas. And then, he headed to Memphis. He moved into the Peabody Hotel and spent his days paying tribute and genuflecting to the dreamers he admired. In the evening, he would return to his room and document his ideas on a makeshift recording set-up, with just his guitar and a microphone. The songs, elegiac in nature, befitting all he had seen, poured out of him. Produced by Sam Cohen (who also worked on Morby's Singing Saw and Oh My God), This Is A Photograph features musical contributions from longtime staples of Morby's live band, as well as old friends and new collaborators alike. If Oh My God saw Morby getting celestial and in constant motion and Sundowner was a study in localized intent, This Is A Photograph finds Morby making an Americana paean, a visceral life and death, blood on the canvas outpouring. As Morby reminds us early on, time is undefeated. So what do we do while we're still here? This is a photograph of that sense of yearning.

Toro y Moi's seventh studio album, Mahal, is the boldest and most fascinating journey yet from musical mastermind Chaz Bear. The record spans genre and sound_encompassing the shaggy psychedelic rock of the 1960s and `70s, and the airy sounds of 1990s mod-post-rock_taking listeners on an auditory expedition, as if they're riding in the back of Bear's Filipino jeepney that adorns the album's cover. But Mahal is also an unmistakably Toro y Moi experience, calling back to previous works while charting a new path forward in a way that only Bear can do. Mahal is the latest in an accomplished career for Bear, who's undoubtedly one of the decade's most influential musicians. Since the release of the electronic pop landmark Causers of This in 2009, subsequent records as Toro y Moi have repeatedly shifted the idea of what his sound can be. But there's little in Bear's catalog that will prepare you for the deep-groove excursions on Mahal, his most eclectic record to date. The second the album begins we're immediately transported into the passenger seat, jeep sounds and all, ready for the ride Chaz and company have concocted for us. Seeds of some of Mahal's 13 songs date back to the more explicitly rock-oriented What For? from 2015. Mahal was mostly completed last year in Bear's Oakland studio with the involvement of a host of collaborators, Sofie Royer and Unknown Mortal Orchestra's Ruban Neilson to Neon Indian's Alan Palomo and the Mattson 2. "I wanted to make a record that featured more musicians on it than any other record of mine," he explains. "To have them live on that record feels grounded, bringing a communal perspective to the table." As a result, Mahal is lush and surprising at every turn, from the cool-handed "The Loop," which recalls Sly and the Family Stones, to the elastic psych rock of "Foreplay" and the dizzying Mulatu Astatke-recalling of "Last Year." Lyrically, the album zooms in on generational concerns, picking up where the Outer Peace standout "Freelance" effectively left off. Bear seems to be surveying the ways in which we connect with technology, media, each other, and what disappears as a result. Cuts like the squishy "Postman" and the "Magazine" take a deep dive into our relationship with media in a changing digital world. "It's interesting to see how we adapt to this new age. We're so connected, but we're still missing out on things," Bear ruminates while discussing the album's themes. It's not all introspection. Bear cools things down near the album's end with the Mattson 2-featuring "Millennium," a laid-back jam with tricky guitar licks about ringing in new times even when everything else seems upside down. "It's about enjoying the new year, even when it's been shitty," Bear explains. "There's nothing else to do." Finding a sense of joy in the face of adversity is embedded in Mahal's DNA, right down to the jeepney that literally and figuratively brings the music out into the community. "We know that touring is messed up for now, and large gatherings are a fluke," he explains. "It's about the notion of us going out to the people and bringing the record to them." And with the wide-open atmosphere of Mahal, Toro y Moi stands to connect with more listeners than ever before.

First pressing on limited edition Transparent Red + Transparent Orange vinyl - 2xLP packaging features die-cut jacket and Side 4 phenakistoscope etching!

A lone pair of footsteps meanders down a street in Omaha, into the neighborhood bar and then into a near-imperceptible tangle of conversations - about wars, sleepless nights - a surrealist din pushing against the sound of ragtime. Then, as the background quiets, a line rings out clearly: "I think about how much people need - what they need right now is to feel like there's something to look forward to. We have to hold on. We have to hold on." Thus we enter the fitting, cacophonic introduction to Bright Eyes' tenth studio album and first release since 2011. Down in the Weeds, Where the World Once Was is an enormous record caught in the profound in-between of grief and clarity - one arm wrestling its demons, the other gripping the hand of love, in spite of it. The end of Bright Eyes' unofficial hiatus came naturally. Conor Oberst pitched the idea of getting the band back together during a 2017 Christmas party at Bright Eyes bandmate Nathaniel Walcott's Los Angeles home. The two huddled in the bathroom and called Mike Mogis, who was Christmas shopping at an Omaha mall. Mogis immediately said yes. There was no specific catalyst for the trio, aside from finding comfort amidst a decade of brutal change. Sure, Why now? is the question, but for a project whose friendship is at the core, it was simply Why not? The resulting Bright Eyes album came together unlike any other of its predecessors. Down in the Weeds is Bright Eyes' most collaborative, stemming from only one demo and written in stints in Omaha and in bits and pieces in Walcott's Los Angeles home. Radically altering a writing process 25 years into a project seems daunting, but Oberst said there was no trepidation: "Our history and our friendship, and my trust level with them, is so complete and deep. And I wanted it to feel as much like a three-headed monster as possible." As a title, as a thesis, Down in the Weeds, Where the World Once Was functions on a global, apocalyptic level of anxiety that looms throughout the record. But on a personal level, it speaks to rooting around in the dirt of one's memories, trying to find the preciousness that's overgrown and unrecognizable. For Oberst, coming back to Bright Eyes was a bit of that. A symbol of simpler times, vaguely nostalgic. And even though it wasn't actually possible to go back to the way things were, even though there wasn't an easy happy ending, there was a new reality left to work with. And here, there is a bleary-eyed hopefulness - earnest, emotive recommitments to love appear on "Dance and Sing" and "Just Once in the World." And throughout, Down in the Weeds features snippets of Oberst's loved ones speaking, in late-night conversations. The fleeting loveliness of intimate moments punctuates the bleakness of the record's existential crisis, crackling like lightning bugs illuminating the long night. Down in the Weeds is a distillation of a prolific, enduring canon. It's immediate and urgent, the product of its creators' growth across a decade apart, as well as the need to make a record together to find solace from loss. Through deliberate, fearless experimentation in process, the trio made the truest Bright Eyes sound: the sound of a deep bond, of a band coming home, but also a seamless continuation, like Bright Eyes never went away. It's the impossible, sprawling mess of human experience that Bright Eyes has always sought to put to tape, since the beginning - the sound of holding on. Why now? Why not?

“It felt like we were in a movie that had a totally implausible ending ...”, so they had to return to keep this movie running.