No tricks. All treats. Read, see and hear for yourself:
Big Joanie
Back Home
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Formed in the heart of London’s DIY punk scene, Big Joanie (guitarist Stephanie Phillips, bassist Estella Adeyeri and drummer Chardine Taylor-Stone) are a Black feminist punk band whose passionate live shows and moreish blend of nineties riot grrrl and synth-heavy post punk, have seen them steadily rise to become one of the most championed bands of the current era. Big Joanie are back with their sophomore record Back Home. Recorded at Hermitage Works Studios in North London, the album was produced and mixed by Margo Broom (Goat Girl, Fat White Family). Back Home is a dramatic leap forward for the band; the band build on their tightly knit, lo-fi punk formula to bring forth a collage of blazing guitars, down tempo dance punk, and melancholic strings that evoke the full depth of the band’s expansive art punk vision. The album title references a search for a place to call home, whether real or metaphysical. “We were really ruminating on the idea of a home and what it means,” explains Stephanie. “It’s about the different ideas of home, whether that’s here in the U.K., back in Africa or the Caribbean, or a place that doesn’t really exist; it’s neither here nor there.”
Ezra Collective
Where I’m Meant To Be
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Ezra Collective’s new era, a venture in discovered maturity and raised stakes, will be defined by the anticipated second album. Where I’m Meant To Be is a thumping celebration of life, an affirming elevation in Ezra Collective’s winding hybrid sound and refined collective character. The songs marry cool confidence with bright energy. Full of call-and-response conversations between their ensemble parts, a natural product of years improvising together on-stage, the album — which also features Sampa The Great, Kojey Radical, Emile Sandé, Steve McQueen and Nao — will light up sweaty dance floors and soundtrack dinner parties in equal measure. “London meets Lusaka. Moments of joy, moments of struggle, but United in a spirit that we must carry on. Life must go on,” states the band describing their inspiration. “We write our music with a consistent will to push the boundaries of what we can mix jazz with. This incorporates the energies of southern African vibes, mixed with our own style of London jazz.”
Dean Fertita
Tropical Gothclub
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Dean Fertita has been at the heart of American rock ’n’ roll for almost two decades, from his role as an invaluable member of Queens Of The Stone Age and The Dead Weather, touring keyboardist with The Raconteurs, and backing musician on records by Jack White, Karen O, Iggy Pop, Brendan Benson, The Kills, Beck and more. While his own music had been the focus in his role as lead singer, guitarist, and founder of The Waxwings and on recordings as Hello=Fire, Fertita began Tropical Gothclub with no clear mission for a solo album under his own name. In early 2020, the Tennessee-based musician put up a small A-frame in his backyard to use as a writing and recording space while stuck at home during the looming pandemic. With rare time on his hands, Fertita set to work recording demos of the many musical ideas he had accumulated over the years, building upon songs and fragments written during different stages of his busy career. “The Tropical Gothclub songs are like concept cars,” says Fertita. “They were meant to be put into future production once they were reimagined and redesigned so everything is tightened up. Creatively things changed and my options weren’t just black and white. They were also fluorescent.”
Horse Lords
Comradely Objects
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Horse Lords return with Comradely Objects, an alloy of erudite influences and approaches given frenetic gravity in pursuit of a united musical and political vision. The band’s fifth album doesn’t document a new utopia, so much as limn a thrilling portrait of revolution underway. Comradely Objects adheres to the essential instrumental sound documented on the previous four albums and four mixtapes by the quartet of Andrew Bernstein (saxophone, percussion, electronics), Max Eilbacher (bass, electronics), Owen Gardner (guitar, electronics), and Sam Haberman (drums). But the album refocuses that sound, pulling the disparate strands of the band’s restless musical purview tightly around propulsive, rhythmic grids. Comradely Objects ripples, drones, chugs, and soars with a new abandon and steely control. Comradely Objects reflects familiar elements of Horse Lords’ established palette — the mantra-like repetition of minimalism and global traditional musics, complex counterpoint, the subtleties of microtonality, a breadth of timbres and textures drawn from all across the avant-garde — with some standout stylistic innovations. At different moments, the album veers closer to free jazz than anything else in the band’s catalog, channels spectral electroacoustic tones, and throbs with unexpected yet felicitous synth. While these new elements are evidence of additional studio time and care, Comradely Objects retains the dizzying obsessive rhythmic energy that galvanizes the best moments of the band.”
Caleb Landry Jones
Gadzooks Vol. 2
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Don’t let the prestigious acting career fool you — Caleb Landry Jones is a bona fide musical maverick. And on hisforthcoming release Gadzooks Vol. 2, he places himself in a lineage of outsider artists, many with only a thin thread tethering them to this reality, who are capable of reaching into the cosmic realms of imagination and bringing back a musical masterpiece. And while most artists don’t save some of the best music of their career for an album with Vol. 2 in the title, Jones is an artist for whom chronology is a slippery substance. One of Jones’s greatest musical gifts is his ability to cover a vast energetic and sonic landscape, with a wide array of instrumentation and vocal stylings over a wholly unique song structure, in a way that feels cohesive and euphoric. And while all his records have an ecstatic quality Gadzooks Vol 2 is perhaps his most soothing and sublime collection to date. Each song has at least a dozen ear worming hooks, all so satisfying you feel a deep longing as they fade until you realize they are being woven into yet another groove-laden, toe-tapping peak. A continual mic drop on an orgasmic wonder wheel.”
Phoenix
Alpha Zulu
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Produced by Grammy-winning French band themselves, and recorded in Paris’s Musée des Arts Décoratifs, which sits in the Palais du Louvre, Alpha Zulu is everything Phoenix does best: Effortlessly catchy melodies married with always-innovative production, resulting in what is destined to be one of 2022’s albums of the year. Indeed, Alpha Zulu — the band’s first album since 2017’s critically acclaimed record Ti Amo — is an immediate reminder of what has made Phoenix one of the most beloved artists of the last two decades, reinforcing the band’s enduring (and continued) influence on pop culture. Working at the Musée brought Phoenix full circle, in a way. As kids growing up in Versailles, they had rebelled against the oppressive French classicism they grew up around — the idea that culture belonged in a museum. And yet, here were four of France’s most important cultural ambassadors, making their next work in such a space. It worked perfectly: Away from the exhibits at the Musée, their studio became a holding space for a jumble of works: Dalí next to Medieval pieces and Lalanne sculptures. “The backstage of the museum is like a mashup,” says Deck. “It’s very pop in a way — like how we make music.”
Special Interest
Endure
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Endure is the third album from New Orleans no-wave punks Special Interest. On every level, Special Interest are uncompromising: In their adventurous sound, their high-energy live performances, and their convictions. Dance music and punk culture have flirted in the warehouse before, but their desire to dismantle genre is informed by a larger abolitionist worldview that resists constraint, category, and conformity. Their music is a soundtrack to dancing the pain away as much as raging against the machine. Special Interest describes the experience of recording Endure as “inverted,” since the pandemic obviously stunted the possibilities of live performance, resulting in a new period of experimentation and sonic exploration in which old rules were cast out. Everything the group writes springs from the same source — a hard-hitting drum machine beat — but the possibilities are endless and the outcome always unpredictable. Collaboration is central to the band’s creative process, and it’s difficult to imagine even one element from the whole of Special Interest subtracted from the equation. Their songs are living organisms, open to the possibility of experimentation and interpretation, but also not the property or creation of any one person.”
Various Artists
Brown Acid: The Fifteenth Trip
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Lo and behold, The Fifteenth Trip is upon us, and it’s another mind-melting dose of brilliant long-lost, rare, and unreleased hard rock, heavy psych, and proto-metal tracks from the ’60s-’70s. Our crate-digging mining expeditions, and growing network of the original artists keeps on giving with more and more incredible discoveries every time we go back for more. Like we’ve done throughout this series, all of these tracks were painstakingly licensed legitimately and the artists were paid. Make yourself comfortable and prepare for yet another deep, deep dive into the treasure trove of dank, subterranean, wild-eyed and hairy rock ’n’ roll of yesteryear.”
