Indie Roundup | 48 Songs To Give You The Will To Carry On This Wednesday (Part 1)

Kandle, Peel, Ida Me, Hiatt & Douglas, Hey, King! and more acts make a day of it.

Kandle knows how to catch flies, Peel set off a blast of dyna-might, Ida Mae break out the dominos, Hey, King! have a bout of road rage, John Hiatt and Jerry Douglas stop to smell the flowers — and we’re just getting warmed up in your latest unmissable Midweek Roundup. No time to waste:

 


1 | Kandle | Honey Trap

THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE:Kandle just shared Honey Trap — a sweet-but-fierce song and video about breaking free from a toxic relationship & reclaiming power as a woman — along with announcing her first independent album Set The Fire, out this spring. The cinematically stunning video features actor Keenan Tracey (Bates Motel, The 100) and Kandle’s all-female supergroup The WiccsLouise Burns, Debra-Jean Creelman (Mother Mother) and Kendel Carsen (Alan Doyle, Great Big Sea) — in a film noir setting exploring themes of manipulation, consent, entitlement, and liberation. Says Kandle: “We play their game until we make our own.”


2 | Peel | Dyna

THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Sydney’s premiere shoegaze ambassadors Peel have returned with another dispatch to keep you dosed their hyper-textured noise program. Memory Loop pulls the hypnotic, fuzz-driven energy we’ve come to love about Peel into cosmic territory, with a searing opening guitar riff gliding into beds of organs, reverb-drenched guitars and lush vocals. This dense wall of sound gives way to an epic finale punctuated by percussive grooves, piercing sequencers, celestial vocal harmonies and a sprawling guitar solo that wouldn’t be out of place on Screamadelica.”


3 | Ida Mae | Click Click Domino (ft. Marcus King)

THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “British blues-rock duo Ida Mae return to announce the details behind their new studio album Click Click Domino, out July 16. It’s previewed by the record’s blistering title track featuring Marcus King. Following in the footsteps of acts like The Kills, The White Stripes and Hozier to name a few, the new single Click Click Domino makes for an anthemic introduction to their next full-length. They said, “This was written kind of as a knee-jerk song. The unfiltered noise of social media, concerns surrounding social engineering, the lack of emotional connection and physical disconnection gets to all of us.”


4 | Hey, King! | Road Rage

THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE:Hey, King! have released their anthemic new single Road Rage. With a sound reminiscent of The Black Keys, the biting electric guitar and drum-driven Road Rage fiercely expresses the frustration women feel with harassment and having their sense of safety threatened but also celebrates their strength. For the song’s video, Natalie London and Taylor Plecity invited 21 women to film themselves lip syncing to the song. Plecity says, “Road Rage is an anthem for female empowerment and having this group of amazing women respond to it visually is extremely humbling.”


5 | John Hiatt With The Jerry Douglas Band | All The Lilacs In Ohio

THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE:John Hiatt with The Jerry Douglas Band will release Leftover Feelings on May 21. The 11-song set was produced by Douglas and recorded at historic RCA Studio B in Nashville. A meeting of two American music giants in a legendary setting, Leftover Feelings is neither a bluegrass album nor a return to Hiatt’s 1980s days with slide guitar greats Ry Cooder and Sonny Landreth. There’s no drummer, yet these grooves are deep and true. And while the up-tempo songs are, as ever, filled with delightful internal rhyme and sly aggression, The Jerry Douglas Band’s empathetic musicianship nudges Hiatt to performances that are startlingly vulnerable.”


6 | Annabelle Chvostek | String of Pearls

THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE:Annabelle Chvostek reveals the video for the title track to her album String of Pearls, set for March 26. String of Pearls is an uplifting song about not only overcoming adversity but transforming that adversity into something positive and beautiful. The video, directed by Carlos Coronado, gives a nostalgic nod to silent movies. “I once read that a pearl starts out as an intrusive irritant,” explains Annabelle, “like a grain of sand, entering the shell of an oyster. As a form of protection it is gradually coated in layer upon layer of richly lustrous nacre, turning and swirling until it becomes a pearl. String Of Pearls is about getting through difficult things, defiantly transforming them and coming out on top.”


7 | Islands | (We Like To) Do It With The Lights On

THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Five years after the last Islands album and 15 years on from the underground classic debut Return to the Sea, the beloved project of profilic indie mainstay Nick Thorburn has re-emerged with the announcement of their 8th full length Islomania, out on June 11. Islands have also shared lead single (We Like To) Do It With The Lights On. “After quitting Islands in 2016, I briefly considered doing writing for others,” says Thorburn. “I came up with the song title as a tossed-off joke. It seemed fitting with the kind of playful innuendo that seems to do well in the pop sphere. Once I started to flesh it out after booting up the band again, I realized it was mine, and for Islands only. I started it with the groove first, and built the melody off the top. This is like most of the songs on this record, which is new for me.”


8 | Whispering Sons | Satantango / Surgery

THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Belgian five-piece Whispering Sons announced their second album Several Others will arrive June 18. They also shared two new songs: Satantango and Surgery. The tracks toy with the delicate balance between moments of fragility and their capability for relentless and driving intensity, experimenting at the point in which no wave, industrial and avant-punk converge. The anxious and propulsive instrumentation is eerily abstracted, while Fenne Kuppens’ words, sung in a dramatic and distinctive low register, inject that extra central tension and darkness.”


9 | Pet Needs | Toothpaste

THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Getting ready for their debut album, Pet Needs have released the video for Toothpaste. It’s a confident new cut that packs a cataclysmic punch. Written as a letter to his 10-year-old self, the track finds frontman Johnny Marriott ruminating on the deep memories we attach to the most mundane of objects. Marriott says: “It was penned on the M1 on the way home from visiting my mum in Derby. She has bought exactly the same toothpaste for years and every time I use it, standing in the bathroom next to my childhood bedroom, it throws me right back to being an anxious little lad trying to make sense of things, haha.”


10 | The Dirty Nil | Elvis ’77

THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE:The Dirty Nil have released a video for their track Elvis ’77. The visual brings together footage of the band’s fans interpreting the lyrics in their own unique and audacious ways. The track appears on the band’s latest album Fuck Art, which was released on the very first day of 2021. Fuck Art is a statement of confidence and defiance from a group that’s now three albums into the game, melting down all of their favorite ingredients — classic-rock heroism, pop-punk horsepower, ’80s indie scrappiness, ’90s alterna-crunch, speed-metal adrenaline — into a radiant, chromatic solution they can then mould and harden into unpredictable shapes.”


11 | Elder Island | Purely Education

THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Indie electronic trio Elder Island reveal the nostalgic video for their single Purely Educational. A song about parties in a time without, the video fittingly follows solo dancer Bethany Kyle in a playful game of imagination and intimacy. Elder Island explain: “Working with Nic Kane, we wanted to create something that reflected the playful qualities of Purely Educational as a track. With a hint of nostalgia and a fair few sequins the video achieves this perfectly.”


12 | Empty Heaven | The Thing

THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Singer-songwriter and producer Empty Heaven is turning heads with the release of his single The Thing. He explains: “Deleuze and Guattari have written pages and pages about capitalism being more than an economic structure; if we are to believe their writings, capitalism has all of the properties of an AI, a decision-making, sentient being. In quotidien thinking, it’s not a far stretch to think of it as a movie monster, shapeshifting into whatever it needs to be, and constantly leaving you behind…or subsuming you. The Thing imagines capitalism in all kinds of ways, and almost none of those ways are pleasant.”


13 | San Holo | Find Your Way (ft. Bipolar Sunshine)

THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE:San Holo shares a unique video to accompany his recent single Find Your Way ft. Bipolar Sunshine. Directed by Thunderlips, a New Zealand duo who, the eye-catching visuals are a mesmerising VHS-inspired journey through dreamlike film sets and studios. San Holo says: “What really drew me to Thunderlips’s vision is how they were able to creatively pull off a performance video even though Bipolar Sunshine and I are on opposite sides of the planet. I love the museum-like feel of the video with all of the unique and dynamic shots.”


14 | Jaialai | For Today

THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Miami psych-dream-pop quartet Jaialai released For Today from upcoming EP As Sweet As I Was, due March 12. Guitarist Jovi Adames said, “For Today is about anxiety and how it feels as if there’s this presence or entity controlling your life. Even though you try to fight it and try to change, you can always find yourself fighting these demons over and over … and that’s OK.”


15 | Brodka | Game Change

THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Polish singer Brodka has shared the track Game Change and its accompanying video. It marks the first new music from her forthcoming album Brut. Game Change is about gender roles, a topic that’s particularly prevalent in her home country at the moment, where reproductive rights are being rolled back by lawmakers. “We all encounter problems when we do not conform to accepted norms,” Brodka states. “I was inspired by the story of the Albanian Sworn Virgins — women who, by taking a vow of chastity, take on a male role in society while gaining all the privileges associated with being a man. They are treated as men but can keep their feminine names.”


16 | Queen Mars | You

THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Chicago R&B artist Queen Mars shares the video for You, the latest single from her upcoming debut EP Trust Issues, due out April 9. “You is about a summer fling that fizzled out,” said Queen Mars. “Everything that bloomed in the spring is dead by winter, including our relationships. Specifically, the other person’s feelings change with the weather and they become colder and more distant as the seasons change even though my feelings remain constant.”

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