Sub Pop Vinyl, CD & Tape 293 Items

Dig deep enough inside yourself -- start treating your body as your sanctuary rather than your enemy -- and eventually you'll find yourself blooming right back out into the sun. That's the transformation Guerilla Toss trace on their newest album Famously Alive, their effervescent Sub Pop debut. After a decade sprinkling glitter into grit, building a reputation as one of the most ferociously creative art-rock groups working, the upstate New York band have eased fully into their light. This is Guerilla Toss at their most luminescent -- awake, alive, and extending an open invitation to anyone who wants to soak it all up beside them. Singer and lyricist Kassie Carlson, multi-instrumentalist Peter Negroponte and guitarist Arian Shafiee wrote Famously Alive at home in the Catskills during the pervading quiet of the pandemic year. The uncertainty of Covid-19 lockdowns and the total disruption of routine forced Carlson to negotiate with herself in new and challenging ways. "You have to be with yourself all the time during the pandemic," she says. "I had to figure out a way to manage my anxiety. The pandemic was hard, but it helped me get comfortable inside my own body. My peace of mind came out of being thrust into the deepest shit. This album is all about being happy, being alive, and strength. It's meant to inspire people." Famously Alive finds Guerilla Toss coming into the fullness of their power, celebrating their prismatic idiosyncrasies from a place of optimism and abundance. It is a joyous album, equal parts bizarre, accessible, and fun.

To experience Justin R. Cruz Gallego's pulverizing Sub Pop debut is to get burned down to ashes and burst forth, born anew. Grim Iconic...(Sadistic Mantra), the Tacoma-based artist's second album, is driven by opposing forces: noisy abstractions and tightly structured beats, anguish and dissolution at the outside world and empowerment within, apathy and catharsis. Grim Iconic...(Sadistic Mantra) weds scouring electronics to hooky songs and Gallego's powerful drumming in a way that feels visceral and new. It's his most personal statement to date, at once playful and intent, driven and combustible, total fucking chaos mixed into glints of broken-glass beauty. Born in Tucson, Arizona, Gallego experienced culture shock as a child after relocating to the frigid climes of the Pacific Northwest. He found solace in the Seattle punk scene centered around Iron Lung Records and has since remained a fixture in the underground community. "I see this record as first and foremost a musical statement," Gallego says. "I grew up in punk and DIY subcultures, but before that I had Latin music playing in the background through my childhood and every phase of adolescence. It was surprisingly natural to incorporate. I realized I wanted to go deeper into these rhythms. I wanted to make a record that felt as experimental as much as it felt from the perspective of a Latino. When I got a glimmer of that possibility, it felt exciting." Lead single "Dogear" is a face-melting party starter that sounds like someone forced Talking Heads and Rudimentary Peni to share a practice space. "I wanted a song that felt playful in the way it attempted to be dissonant without taking itself too seriously," Gallego says. "Cholla Beat" is even more ambitious, an anthemic mix of WAR and Wire led by unruly synthesizers spiraling down a labyrinth of production. Gallego's influences for the album are vast, ranging from British documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis to electric Miles Davis to audio miscreants like Demdike Stare and Oneohtrix Point Never. But it's Gallego's assured sonic vision that resounds the loudest. And, while J.R.C.G. is a solo project, conceived and executed primarily in Gallego's home studio, he found strength in opening the project to others, starting with Seth Manchester as co-producer. Manchester's penchant for bone-rattling frequencies, as seen in his production work with The Body, Battles, and Mdou Moctar, made him a natural fit for Gallego. Together, they retained the intimacy of Gallego's home recordings while taking advantage of the hi-fi stylings of his Machines With Magnets Studio in Rhode Island. The closing song, "World i," offers a glimpse into the live experience of Grim Iconic...(Sadistic Mantra), with upwards of seven band members blasting off. The album features a fascinating mix of supporting players, many of whom cycle through J.R.C.G.'s live lineup: Morgan Henderson (The Blood Brothers, Fleet Foxes), Jason Clackley (Dreamdecay, The Exquisites), Jon Scheid (Dreamdecay, U Sco), Erica Miller (Casual Hex, Big Bite), Veronica Dye (Terminator) Phil Cleary (U Sco), and Alex Gaziano (Dreamdecay, Kidcrash, Science Amplification). Taken as a whole, G.I.S.M. is a whirlwind of sound, pummeling, and cleansing. It's a sweaty, thrilling aural adventure and, like a great basement show, it'll leave you breathless, exhausted, and wanting to repeat it all over again. As any good mantra should.

Initial LP pressing on Yellowy Green Vinyl. The music of Washed Out has always levitated over a timeless frontier. You can sense it in his immersive, amorphous vocals, the expansive soundscapes, the wistful storytelling. It's a sweet spot where, says its creative force, Ernest Greene, "any sort of association or memory from the past can transport you instantly. I love that." Greene's transcendent output has earned him the moniker of "Godfather of Chillwave" by Pitchfork and a co-sign from Portlandia, which borrowed his track, "Feel It All Around," for its utopian theme song. His latest, Notes From a Quiet Life arrives after delivering more than a decade of distinct and disparate creative re-imaginations at a remarkably high level (five albums, two EPs). Notes is bold in its intuitiveness: Greene has left the treadmill of music-as-a-business, instead letting his artistic interests lead the way. "Each album," says Green, who also paints and sculpts, "is a world-building exercise." The Georgia native left Atlanta in 2021 to move back to the countryside he knew growing up. Where escapism once flooded his thoughts, today he is preoccupied with the universe of wonder in the reality around him. He named the former horse farm he moved to "Endymion" (after the pastoral John Keats poem about a lovesick shepherd - its opening line: "A thing of beauty is a joy for ever"), and it has shaped all that he's created there, from his music to his albums' creative direction to his planned large scale visual-art experiments. "I've read that every five, maybe 10, years, you're practically a different person - like literally, on a cellular level," Greene explains. "The things that you're going through will end up changing you, and you're kind of a different person. This album is a reflection of that. Experimenting with painting and sculpture helps my music. They influence each other. That was a kind of realization for me. I don't want to look back on my life one day, and be like, 'Oh, it was all about maximizing productivity,'" he says. "I want to enjoy this." That purity of vision is what makes Notes From a Quiet Life so potent. It's the first album Greene wholly self-produced, with some mixing assistance from Nathan Boddy (James Blake, Mura Masa) and David Wrench (Caribou, Florence + the Machine). "Early in my career, I had a lack of technical skill, and there were some things I wasn't 100% enthusiastic about," he says, noting Jean-Michel Basquiat's distinct, self-driven method as an inspiration. "Something that I was looking for was...I didn't want any illusion of anyone else's influences. I wanted to see this through to the end. And honestly, that was a big challenge. Illustrating that, Greene's list of influences for Notes From a Quiet Life are mostly sculpture icons: minimalist legend Donald Judd, abstract expressionist Cy Twombly, and modernists Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore. Of the latter, he observes, "The majority of his working life was spent on his country estate, and he wasn't living a cosmopolitan lifestyle. He was focused on just making good work, you know?" Notes from a Quiet Life is Washed Out's fifth album.

January 2023, Dorset. Snow is piled at the door, icy roads are closed, and Emily Cross is in a coffin. Not a setting typical for a rebirth. But for Loma, this is where they bring their band back from the brink. "It's like a demon enters the room, whenever we get together", writer, singer and instrumentalist Cross says of the struggle to bring new Loma music into the world. Following the release of their 2020 second album Don't Shy Away, Loma's three members were cast around the globe and the band-not for the first time-entered a deep sleep. Multi-instrumentalist and recording engineer Dan Duszynski remained in his studio in Don't Shy Away's central Texas heart, but Cross, a UK citizen, moved to Dorset, and writer and instrumentalist Jonathan Meiburg left the US for Germany to research a book. In the pandemic years, even being in the same room was impossible, and attempts to start a new record faltered.The following winter, in an attempt to salvage the record and the band, Cross suggested they regroup in the UK, in the tiny stone house-once a coffin-maker's workshop-where she works as an end-of-life doula. With minimal recording gear and few instruments, Loma turned two whitewashed rooms into a makeshift studio, using a padded coffin as a vocal booth. It was a turning point. They scrapped much of what they'd made, letting a new place set a new course. The one-lane roads, hedgerows and dark skies of Dorset gave the new songs an ineffable but unmistakable Englishness. The band used the ruin of a 12th-century chapel as a reverb chamber-surprising hillwalkers who peeked in to find them singing to no one-and the sounds of Cross's chilly workshop wormed their way into the recording: a leaky pipe, a drummer's brushes on a metal lampshade, the voices left on an ancient answering machine.What emerged was How Will I Live Without A Body?: a gorgeous, unique, and oddly comforting album about partnership, loss, regeneration, and fighting the feeling that we're all in this alone. Many of its songs have a feeling of restl...