All Eyes On
Hector Tellez Jr: The Cuban Shaking Up America’s Rock Scene
Four years ago, Cuban-born musician Hector Tellez Jr. was living in Havana: playing local clubs several nights a week, delivering passionate performances of well-oiled melodic blues rock. His style, merging the grit of Muddy Waters wailing on electric guitars with the tender-hearted yet mysterious air of Jeff Buckley, was not always welcomed by the locals, however. “In Cuba, it’s a Spanish language country, so I struggled a bit singing rock songs in English,” Tellez Jr. tells SPIN on a recent FaceTime video call from a friend’s backyard, looking every bit the brooding rocker, save for some frequent smiles. He’s wearing a cut-off muscle tee that shows off a few tattoos and a pair of round-rimmed sunglasses that look straight out of the John Lennon playbook. “There were a lot of naysayers, p...
Miloe’s Bobby Kabeya on Meeting Hippo Campus, Wind Chimes and gaps
In the summer of 2020, while stuck at his parent’s house in Minneapolis, Bobby Kabeya was recording his neighbor’s wind chimes with his phone in the middle of the night. He thought that those early morning chimes, birds, and tree breezes would complement the acoustic textures that now open his latest EP, gaps, which was released on Sept. 16. Looking back, starting a music career in 2019 maybe wasn’t the most conventional decision. Like all artists in 2020, the leader of alt-rock project Miloe was halted from pursuing his rookie-musician dreams of performing live, meeting his fans and going into a studio to make music. But the 19-year-old Kabeya was able to debut his first few songs just before the COVID-19 lockdowns, befriended indie bands Hippo Campus and Beach Bunny, and wrangled t...
Enumclaw: Tacoma’s Indie Vanguard
Enumclaw call themselves the best band since Oasis. That’s what they have listed in their social media bios, but they don’t sound much like them. There is scarcely anything about Enumclaw’s sound that resembles Britpop because they are neither British nor pop. Still, their list of influences is notably eclectic, which includes Drake, New Edition, Nirvana, and, of course, Oasis. Regardless, the closest they come to the Gallagher brothers is through their ‘90s alt-rock stylings and the fact that they have two brothers, frontman Aramis Johnson and bassist Eli Edwards, in the band. “I don’t think it’s necessarily a direct comparison,” Johnson tells SPIN. “It’s more so, I want to be in the next stadium band, and they’re the last stadium band unless you count Coldplay, but I don’t think you shou...
Toledo’s Brotherhood and ‘Hustler Mentality’ Fueled Debut LP, How It Ends
Music isn’t just a plug-and-play affair to Brooklyn indie duo Toledo — it’s a bond deeper than songwriting. That brotherhood defines the duo’s debut LP, How It Ends (out today on Grand Jury Music), which blends modern indie rock stylings with ‘90s adult contemporary flourishes and the gloomy musings of Elliott Smith. Toledo sprang from the passion of childhood friends Dan Álvarez de Toledo and Jordan Dunn-Pilz, who grew up busking in the coastal town of Newburyport, Mass., and developed an ironclad relationship through music. “That’s how our hustler mentality started,” Dunn-Pilz said. The late ‘20s duo are still hustling — they also operate a Brooklyn recording studio. Over cold beers (and one comically large tropical drink) at a Brooklyn tiki bar, the duo spoke to SPIN about the new ...
How Reggaeton Beats Set Divino Niño Free on ‘Last Spa on Earth’
The onset of the pandemic separated most of us from our routines and normal sources of support. It hurt, but it wasn’t always bad. The members of Chicago indie-pop band Divino Niño are among those who found freedom in the isolation. They exited 2020 with an album that’s fun, thoughtful, and possibly even healing, by throwing out their preconceptions. Those familiar with the sunny, psychedelic jangle of Divino Niño’s full-length debut, 2019’s Foam, will notice a shift in gears on the quintet’s follow-up, Last Spa on Earth. The project opens with a viscous dembow beat, over which guitarist Camilo Medina and bassist Javier Forero languidly sing-rap. Over the next 11 tracks, lush synth pop mingles with reggaeton, house, and trap. Upbeat single “Tu Tonto” has a bit of everything, including drum...
Dear Boy’s Decade-in-the-Making Debut
Dear Boy are on their own timeline. They’re not beholden to any current musical trends. Their work feels evergreen. It’s bittersweet and unabashedly nostalgic. It recalls ‘80s/’90s U.K. post-punk, new wave, and goth rock, especially the Cure, New Order, the House of Love, Pulp, Roxy Music, and the Jesus and Mary Chain, but manages to be fresh and modern by recontextualizing those sounds in present-day Southern California. They have a distinctive visual aesthetic, often utilizing black and white photography and vintage imagery. Over the past 10 years, they’ve self-released a string of increasingly excellent singles and EPs but no full-length. Now, two presidents and a pandemic later, the band is just getting around to putting out their first full-length: Forever Sometimes. So…what took so l...
DOMi and JD BECK Just Want to Shut Up and Play Their Hits
Kids today … with their memes, vapes and disdain for all things old. Don’t they know what they’re missing, like the satisfaction that comes with learning how to play and eventually master an actual instrument that isn’t a laptop? You’d be forgiven for ascribing such a sentiment to a local boomer or aging music critic, but when articulated by DOMi (22, keyboards) and JD BECK (19, drums), it carries a little more weight. That’s because the two musical prodigies are making it cool again to be a virtuoso and aren’t shy about saying so — an attribute at the heart of their long-awaited debut album, NOT TiGHT. The pair met in 2018 at the National Association of Music Merchants (NAMM) convention in Anaheim, Calif., and have been making music ever since, dropping jaws with their instrumental panach...
Blondshell Is Finding Beauty in Love, Anger and Sadness
In about three weeks, Sabrina Teitelbaum will hit the road opening for Porridge Radio as part of her first proper tour as Blondshell, capping an artistic journey that began by absorbing her parents’ favorite music as a New York City teenager, discarding it in favor of grunge, new wave, and Britpop and eventually summoning the courage to start performing at local open-mic nights, including one above the M&M’s World store in Times Square. “I had terrible stage fright as a kid. My dad’s idea was for me to play for his friends when they’d come over, but that didn’t help,” Teitelbaum tells SPIN. “So I just Googled ‘open-mic nights.’ I was underage, so my sister would go with me. I’d be trying out stage names — Sabrina Teitelbaum isn’t a great stage name [Laughs]. It just doesn’t flow, you k...
Sudan Archives Builds Her Own World
The prom queen, characterized by unkempt makeup and a tattered dress while emanating a histrionic vibe, is a pop culture symbol with extensive lineage. Courtney Love used the aesthetic for the cover of Hole’s 1994 alternative classic album Live Through This. In 2021, pop behemoth Olivia Rodrigo deployed it for Sour Prom, her concert film. Most recently, Brittney Parks, who uses the moniker Sudan Archives to record shapeshifting indie-pop, put her own spin on the well-worn motif with Natural Brown Prom Queen. On her second full-length record, Parks discards the typically disheveled prom-queen aesthetic to present imaginative idealism. Tears of makeup aren’t streaming down her face. Instead, Parks joyously assumes the prom-queen title as the person she is today. “Basically, when I go on tour...
Welcome to the Wonderful World of Doechii
Given the Zoom fatigue of the past two years, you can’t blame Doechii for having her camera off during our conversation. Still, despite the possible interview burnout she’s experiencing, her energy is palpable: Our faceless face-to-face chat flows freely from new music to her zodiac sign to who would win in a fight, Junie B. Jones or Lilo from Lilo & Stitch. (“Junie B. is gonna swing first, and it’s gonna catch Lilo off guard,” she rationalizes. “Lilo do got hands, though.”) Even in life’s most tiresome moments, she’s effervescent. It’s been a whirlwind year. In March, the Tampa-bred 23-year-old (given name Jaylah Hickmon) inked a deal with Top Dawg Entertainment (TDE), becoming the label’s first female emcee. This summer, she made her solo network TV debut on The Tonight Show with Jim...
Rare Americans Are the Pop-Punk Band With Eye-Catching Animated Videos
For any musical artist, visuals are often a key component of their work. But for Rare Americans, it’s what sets them apart from their peers. At the heart of the band’s work is its penchant for storytelling. Their fascination with the way people interact in the world echoes throughout their music. But their entire unique style was a happy accident that came to exist like an additional member of the band. At the foundation of Rare Americans is a brothers’ bond — but it didn’t exactly start out that way. Until 2017, James and Jared Priestner had never really spent a ton of time together due to an 11-year age gap between them. They were living very different lives — James as a player in the Western Hockey League, while Jared was working in the family business. But an impromptu trip to the Cari...
Art Moore Are Eloquent Indie-Pop Daydreamers
Art Moore’s Taylor Vick is a daydreamer. “I recently learned that some people, if you tell them to close their eyes and imagine an apple, there’s no image that appears,” she says. “For me, I very clearly see shit in my mind — eyes open or shut. I can often get lost in that.” This power informed Art Moore, the trio’s self-titled debut album. Vick, who’s spent the last decade as a folky singer-songwriter under the name Boy Scouts, teamed up with regular Ezra Furman collaborators Sam Duerkes and Trevor Brooks to create a record of evocative indie-pop vignettes. On “Snowy,” Vick imagines herself as a widow, overcome with a rush of memories as she embarks on a winter road trip. On “Muscle Memory,” she pictures walking by an ex’s house half-accidentally, sitting down at their old meeting sp...
