No musician wants to join The 27 Club — but they should be happy to be in this gang of 27. Here, they (and you) get to rub shoulders with the likes of Jim James and My Morning Jacket, the late Kinky Friedman, Foxy Shazam, Patti Smith and the rest of the artists releasing new music next week. Introduce yourself (but try not to make it weird, OK?):
Ed Kuepper & Jim White
After The Flood
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Ed Kuepper (The Saints) and Jim White (Dirty Three) announce collaborative album After The Flood. The two titans of Australian music have produced a goldmine of reimagined Kuepper originals taken from his illustrious career. The intention for the pairing was to play a few casual shows together in 2020, but the onset of Covid and a turbulent touring schedule saw them perform two sold-out nights at the Sydney Opera House and fluke the only gig at Rising before the Melbourne festival was cancelled. From this chaos, a bond was forged that sent them into the studio. “We took what Jim and I had been doing live and brought it into the studio. It was important that we captured the immediacy of what we’d been doing, that it wasn’t laboured over. Everything was laid down live,” said Kuepper. The resulting album is After The Flood which Ed referred to as “The broadest representation of what we did, with the most variety.”
//Less
Crawl In The Blur
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “//Less are a post-punk noise-rock trio formed in 2021 in Tours, France, creating a massive and striking wall of sound with an unconventional lineup: drums and two basses, one uniquely modified. The band quickly gained attention for the raw energy of their performances, often compared to Metz and certain other Sub Pop bands. //Less made their mark on the international underground scene in 2022 with the release of several digital singles, collected on limited vinyl as their debut EP Social Disappointment, a split label release with TGIC Records. After more than 100 shows, including tours in Italy, Europe, and across France, //Less continues to electrify stages with an intense live presence and a fierce drive to connect with audiences.”
My Morning Jacket
Is
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “For more than 25 years, My Morning Jacket have achieved an incredibly rare feat in the world of rock ’n’ roll, upholding a long-established cultural legacy while sustaining all the curiosity and creative hunger of their very earliest days. In a monumental step for the Louisville-bred five-piece — vocalist/guitarist Jim James, bassist Tom Blankenship, guitarist Carl Broemel, drummer Patrick Hallahan, keyboardist Bo Koster — their 10th studio album finds the band deviating from their typically self-produced approach and teaming up with Grammy winner Brendan O’Brien (one of the most esteemed producers in rock music, known for his extensive work with Bruce Springsteen and Pearl Jam). Arriving as My Morning Jacket celebrates the 20th anniversary of their landmark album Z, Is once again expands the limits of their sound and elevates their artistry to unprecedented heights. The result: the most masterfully realized work yet from a band fully committed to their belief in music as a conduit for revelation of all kinds. For James — who’s produced or co-produced all of the band’s studio albums since their 1999 debut Tennessee Fire — the decision to work with O’Brien stemmed from a newfound willingness to open up their process and involve an outside creative force in shaping the latest iteration of My Morning Jacket’s restlessly inventive yet nuanced form of psych-rock. “Up until now I’ve never been able to let go and allow someone else to steer the ship,” he says. “It almost felt like an out-of-body experience to step back and give control over to someone who’s far more accomplished and made so many more records than us, but in the end I was able to enjoy the process maybe more than I ever have before.”
Private Lives
Salt Of The Earth
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “More musically accomplished, more obsessively self-questioning, and with equally energetic yet simply deceiving performances, Salt Of The Earth finds Private Lives coming into their own. The Montreal group of hitmakers — vocalist Jackie Blenkarn, guitarist Chance Hutchison, bassist Josh Herlihey and drummer Drew Demers — swerve through a bumper-to-bumper sprawl of charging vocals, searing guitar lines, and a bolting rhythm section that proves sheer rock ’n’ roll is still very much alive. Where their debut LP Hit Record was a snapshot of a band in motion, Salt of The Earth is a perfect result of the group’s rapid evolution, undercutting power pop conventions and challenging itself track after track. In a time of derivative punk trends, Salt Of The Earth is a refreshing take for pure pop for now people.”
David Ramirez
All The Not So Gentle Reminders
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “David Ramirez took a little time to get back to himself, and now he’s dead set on making music for himself — for the sake of the music, and nothing else. “I love all the records I’ve made in the past,” says Ramirez. “But in making them, there was always the thought in the back of my mind of where and what it could get me. I made both creative and business decisions with a goal in mind; a goal that often never came. This time it was all about just the joy of making it, about having fun with it.” The Austin, TX singer-songwriter — whose career has seen six full-length studio albums, three EPs, countless collaborations, and an illustrious supergroup project in Glorietta — spent a season of rest away from his focus on writing songs. In the wake of the end of a long relationship, he wanted to prioritize processing his grief as a human, not as an artist bleeding onto the page. “The last thing I wanted was to write a heartbreak record. So I stopped writing altogether, and I just waited until I saw my heart start coming back to life. I wanted the next thing to be hopeful and sweet and beautiful — a testament to music and my love for it.”
Satanique Samba Trio
Cursed Brazilian Beats Vol. 1
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Satanique Samba Trio is an instrumental avant-garde quintet (yep, not really a trio), founded in 2003 with the sole purpose of posing as an idiosyncratic force on the Brazilian musical landscape. No Brazilian traditional rhythm remains unscathed on Satanique Samba Trio’s trail of desecration. From samba to forró, from bossa nova to lambada, this Brasília-based quintet (sometimes sextet) has been adding virulence, dissonance and provocation to Brazil’s musical heritage. Satanique Samba Trio kicked off in 2003. After hundreds of memorable shows all over Brazilian soil (some of them on the same bills as Tom Ze, Nana Vasconcelos or Hermeto Pascoal), the band went to Europe for the first time in 2016. From Denmark to Greece, Satanique Samba Trio introduced its disassembled versions of Brazilian traditional rhythms to unexpecting European ears.”
Soundwalk Collective With Patti Smith
Correspondences Vol. 2
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “On the edge of the forest surrounding Chernobyl, a stone’s throw from the Pripyat River, stands the church of St. Elijah, the only house of worship still operational within the 1000 square-mile radioactive exclusion zone. There, in the courtyard, stands the Bell of Sorrow, which rings just once a year, at exactly 1:23am on 26 April, the moment when human history was forever altered, 39 years ago, as Reactor Four of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant exploded, scattering its deadly, invisible poison throughout the land. Ten miles northwest, at the centre of the zone, stands a much larger bell-shaped structure, a 31,000-tonne sarcophagus of concrete and steel, tall enough to entomb the Notre-Dame de Paris or the Duomo of Milan. Deep inside it, the nuclear fuel of Reactor 4 still burns unstoppably, and will continue to burn for two millennia more, while outside nature thrives in the near total absence of human intervention. It’s here, where the natural meets the unthinkable, that the story of Soundwalk Collective and Patti Smith’s Correspondences continues. More than 10 years in the making, the audiovisual project centres on eight pieces initially composed as slow, meditative tracking shots for unmade movies using field recordings painstakingly gathered by Collective founder Stephan Crasneanscki on journeys of discovery, inspired as much by the interface of humanity with the natural world as by the lives of the canonical writers, filmmakers and revolutionaries both artists admire. Presented with these invisible landscapes, Smith improvised and wrote her own spoken-word poetry over the top, often at a distance, allowing the sonic impressions to draw out thoughts and phrases that crystallise into moments of clarity and revelation. “It’s a process of discovery through improvisation and channelling,” she explains. “We are sort of two halves, and we merge together the mental and physical traveller to get the atmosphere and the visual content — the music, even — and the words that will articulate what we want to do.”
South Hill Experiment
Earthbreaks
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Earthbreaks, the South Hill Experiment’s third LP in two years, opens with an indeterminate resonance, a strange whirr that slowly amplifies and pans across the stereo field — apparently, bowed acoustic guitar paired with the sample of a seismometer recording the movements of tectonic plates. “We wanted the Earth itself to literally provide the sonic foundation of the album,” says Gabe Acheson, who is one half of the Experiment along with his brother Baird. “At the risk of beating our titular metaphors to death, there’s a gravity here that’s not present on our previous projects.” Named for the address of their warehouse studio south of downtown Los Angeles, the South Hill Experiment began as a vehicle for the Acheson brothers to tool around with recording techniques. Armed with a manifesto, they released Moonshots (2023), its exuberant followup Sunstrikes (also 2023), and the EP South Hill & Friends (2024). Completing the trilogy, Earthbreaks carries forward their iconoclastic spirit, with 11 songs that showcase the brothers’ prodigious gifts. Themes of resignation — from dread and longing toward acceptance and willfulness — are reflected in a melancholy production style built on blue-feeling instrumentation: Faraway vocals, detuned synths, muted bass, fractured guitars, prepared piano.”
SpiritWorld
Helldorado
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “With Helldorado, the third installment of SpiritWorld’s death-western trifecta, chief hombre Stu Folsom and his rhinestone-encrusted, Stetson-wearin’ wrecking crew take you deeper into a world where the hot desert sun beats down on a singular vision of the American West as a gateway to hell. “It’s a different album than the past two,” says Folsom of the thematic and sonic journey that began with the Las Vegas band’s 2020 Pagan Rhythms LP and continued with 2022’s Deathwestern. From the honky-tonk swing of opener Abilene Grime to the Slayer-worthy riffing of No Vacancy in Heaven and the unforgettable Oblivion (which features members of Black Braid and Rise Against), SpiritWorld’s story rides on with this latest offering, blasting Mojave-born bloodlust and stomping tomahawk riffs while charging straight into a sonic vision of macabre Americana.”
The Taxpayers
Evil Everywhere
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Welcome to Circle Breaker, the new Taxpayers album. As I write this, it has been nearly a decade since the release of Big Delusion Factory, the last one. Think of it! How much the world has changed since the summer of 2016: A global pandemic, a new presidency, countless wars, Me Too, Black Lives Matter, artificial intelligence, various climate catastrophes, the overturning of Roe v Wade. That’s just off the top of my head. What a wild ride this decade has been. Why do these things happen? What is the point of it all? Not long after we began working on this album, amid a week of turmoil, Andrew texted me a photo he had taken of a tree stump. In the previous week, his friend’s child, a young adult who he had watched grow up and shared a home with, had been gunned down and murdered over a dispute at a park a few blocks away. In the following day of horror, as friends and family began to gather at their home to hold each other and mourn, a chainsaw began to roar, shaking the windows and drowning out the grief. A cherry tree that stood on city property in front of their house had grown roots which were breaking the concrete sidewalk, and it was now being cut down by workers in hard hats. And they were doing a bad job of it. They hacked and hacked away at it until nothing but a mangled stump remained. It was terrible and surreal, he told me, on a day that was already terrible and surreal.”
Verbian
Casarder
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Verbian understand that evolution is essential to heavy music. And so is commitment to revealing profound emotions and letting artistic expression take your music wherever you dare to go. “Casarder speaks a little about the insecurities of artistic expression and personal exposure when it comes to fearing being judged for something that is somewhat outside of what is done in each artist’s niche,” the Portugal band explain. “This was the theme that also inspired the album cover.” The distorted, anxious and surrealist visual style of the album’s cover art (see below, painted by artist Madalena Pinta) speaks perfectly to the album’s direct albeit melted psychedelic electronic post-metal. Riff after riff comes and goes, never wearing out its welcome, and instead pulling listeners along on a sonic journey through Salvador Dali landscapes of rock forms, pulled apart and reconfigured into mesmerizing new ones. The mostly instrumental album never lingers on a part too long, never wastes a note. It’s angry, driving and multilayered without sounding overly technical or indulgent.”
Welly
Big In The Suburbs
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Welly are reporting for duty as the next great British band. Their debut album Big In The Suburbs centres on the monochrome mundanity but also the unsung beauty of the suburbs; a collection of picture-perfect, alt-pop vignettes, in which regular lives are often quietly on the brink of going berserk. For this debut album — all written and self-produced by Welly himself — this rich tableaux of British life is celebrated for all its tragedies and triumphs.Here are songs about wanting more than you have, a world in flux, doomed romance, and figuring out how to be happy where everybody knows your name (and your Mum’s).”
YHWH Nailgun
45 Pounds
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “YHWH Nailgun is a luminary four-person experimental rock project in N.Y.C., made up of artists Zack Borzone (vocals), Saguiv Rosenstock (guitar), Jack Tobias (synth and electronics), and Sam Pickard (drums). Their music is a visceral blend of styles that reaches toward an absolute essence. 45 Pounds is a record of thrilling cacophony: Whirring drums meet the sound of instruments which have been twisted and bent into new shapes, all of which are paired with the arresting growls of Zack Borzone. Across the record the four-piece re-imagine what is possible within the confines of a band set up, creating music that perfectly encapsulates the information overload of our times.”
Young Widows
Power Sucker
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “The sounds, songs, and passages within Power Sucker are the very reason that Young Widows are still a band after an 11-year creative pause; they remain masters at making music with equal parts sonic and emotional weight. Young Widows have inspired scores of underground artists across the globe with their unique collage of noise-rock, hardcore, and post-punk and pioneering presentation. The Young Widows sound — or more accurately, the Young Widows feel — is in full battering ram motion on their fifth studio album. The heaviness of Power Sucker isn’t mysterious. The Louisville power trio play their individual parts with such recognizable precision and style that once entwined together each completed piece becomes an integral part of the puzzle. The sizzling guitars, growling bass, and lock-tight drums rip through the pavement that Young Widows had previously laid to allow the most forward-moving vocal arrangements of their now two-decade career. Historical accomplishments aside, Power Sucker has the shock and wonder of a new band’s debut album.”
