Indie Folk
Dawes Announce Fall 2021 Tour Dates
<span class="localtime" data-ltformat="F j, Y | g:ia" data-lttime="2021-04-13T18:56:38+00:00“>April 13, 2021 | 2:56pm ET Dawes have announced an expansive fall tour in support of their latest album Good Luck with Whatever, which came out last October during the coronavirus pandemic doldrums. The band’s seventh studio album was previewed with singles like “Who Do You Think You’re Talking To?” and “Didn’t Fix Me”, the latter of which was one of our favorite songs of 2020. While the band was able to promote Good Luck with Whatever with performances on Kimmel and Colbert, this 32-date trek is their first opportunity to capitalize on the album’s success. The tour is broadly divided into two legs. The first part kicks o...
Becca Mancari Unveils New EP Juniata: Stream
Indie folk songwriter Becca Mancari has unveiled her new EP Juniata, out via Captured Tracks. Stream it below via Apple Music or Spotify. The project, which she announced last month, is her first collection of new material since her 2020 sophomore LP, The Greatest Part, which earned her Artist of the Month honors and placement on our best albums of 2020 list. That record was produced by Paramore’s Zac Farro, and it saw the Nashville-based singer-songwriter strike a fine balance between dusty indie-folk and brisk indie rock. This new offering slows things down quite a bit. The only brand new track on here is its lead single “Annie”, while the other three are acoustic renditions of The Greatest Part cuts “First Time”, “Bad Feeling”, and “Stay with Me”. The project is a great opport...
Hiss Golden Messenger Announces New Album Quietly Blowing It, Shares “If It Comes in the Morning”: Stream
Hiss Golden Messenger’s M.C Taylor will find out this weekend if his last LP, 2019’s Terms of Surrender, takes home the Best Americana Album at this year’s Grammy Awards. Even with that anticipation looming, the ever-prolific Americana artist has already set his sights on his next effort, as he’s today announced Quietly Blowing It. As a preview of the June 25th release, Taylor has shared “If It Comes in the Morning”. Arriving via Merge, Quietly Blowing It was written during the spring and summer of the tumultuous 2020. Even before that year “rolled up on us like an existential mugger,” as Taylor himself puts it, he was feeling burnt out. He’d canceled an Australian tour in 2019, and left the road ready for “the time and space to mourn something, though I wasn’t sure what.” When h...
Maple Glider Unveils New Song “Good Thing”: Stream
Melbourne songwriter Maple Glider has signed to Partisan Records and shared the new single “Good Thing”. The artist born Tori Ziestch joins a stacked Partisan roster that includes Laura Marling, Fela Kuti, IDLES, and Fontaines D.C. She has a sweet, smoky voice which she likes to keep at a whisper — the better to add drama when she unleashes a powerful belt. Her label debut “Good Thing” is a slowed-down guitar track, with stately strumming enlivened by the occasional crisp snap of a drum. Lyrically, the song explores the sadness and confusion of a relationship near its end. “But I guess that’s how we learn,” she sings as the music swells. “By setting fire to things that bring us life/ Before we’ve got to watch them burn.” In a statement, she explained the intention behind the track, w...
Julien Baker Unveils New Album Little Oblivions: Stream
Julien Baker has unveiled her highly-anticipated new album Little Oblivions. Stream it below via Apple Music and Spotify. As she did on her first album, 2015’s Sprained Ankle, and the 2017 follow-up, Turn Out the Lights, Baker wrote, performed, and produced every track. The biggest difference this time around might be Baker herself. In 2018, she formed boygenius with Lucy Dacus and Phoebe Bridgers, and their powerful self-titled debut introduced each artist to new fans and fresh approaches to songwriting. Still, despite everything good that’s come from her career, Baker lived through a “really difficult year,” and she sees Little Oblivions as a “pretty pessimistic record.” As she explained in an interview with Consequence of Sound on Kyle Meredith with…, “I wrote this record over...
Andrew Bird and Jimbo Mathus Unveil New Song “Poor Lost Souls”: Stream
Andrew Bird and Jimbo Mathus wish blessings on Los Angeles’ homeless population on their new song “Poor Lost Souls”. The former Squirrel Nut Zippers bandmates have remained friends since parting ways in the ’90s, and Bird even joined SNZ for “Train on Fire” from their 2020 album Lost Songs of Doc Souchon. Now, the two songwriters are fulfilling a longtime ambition and collaborating on an album, These 13, which contains a baker’s dozen of folksy new tracks. The latest, “Poor Lost Souls”, takes place in LA, where, as the lyrics have it, you can “Look down and see the stars/ Look up and see the gold/ Look around and see these poor lost souls.” Mathus keeps up a steady groove of guitar, while Bird adds fiddle accents. The song highlights the absurdity of abundance surrounding need, w...
Meskerem Mees Unveils New Song “Seasons Shift”: Stream
21-year-old songwriter Meskerem Mees drew international attention with her first single “Joe”, and now she’s proving she’s a talent to watch with her new song “Seasons Shift”. Mees enchants from the moment she opens her mouth, with an ethereal voice and cosmopolitan accent (she’s Belgian with Ethiopian roots). Alongside her friend the cellist Febe Lazou, she crafts gentle music out of turbulent emotions. “Seasons Shift” is more about a variable person than the changing weather, with lyrics that track differences over time. She sings of someone who “got serious in December/ Lonely in July, though you wouldn’t tell me why/ It might have been easier just to call me but you preferred to cry.” At first she seems to be sketching out a failed relationship, but as the song progresses, her co...
Song of the Week: A Pixilated Rico Nasty Earns High Score in “LiLBiTcH” Video Game
Song of the Week breaks down and talks about the song we just can’t get out of our head each week. Find these songs and more on our Spotify Top Songs playlist. For our favorite new songs from emerging artists, check out our Spotify New Sounds playlist. Take a deep breath … we have a sane president, a history-making veep, and “Individual-1” banned from Twitter … exhale. That’s not to say that life is all good or that all the problems we face as a nation are suddenly solved. No, it takes a lot of work to undo a four-year con job. That said, it won’t hurt if we take a measly two minutes and sixteen seconds out of our stressful, cooped-up lives to relax and, in the parlance of my time, take a chill pill with, well, chillpill. For those unfamiliar, chillpill is the name of the 15-year collabora...
Indigo Sparke Unveils New Song “Everything Everything”: Stream
Rising Australian songwriter Indigo Sparke has unveiled the new song “Everything Everything”. Alongside an intimate music video, she’s also announced her signing with Sacred Bones Records to release her debut album Echo, out January 29th. As with all the songs on Echo, “Everything Everything” was produced by Andrew Sarlo and Adrianne Lenker of Big Thief. Over a gentle guitar with occasional piano accents, Sparke sings in an ethereal soprano, which she later undercuts with a section of spoken word. “Everything,” she says, “Everything, everything, everything is dying.” In a statement, Sparke explained how the song came together, writing, “I wrote this song not long after coming back from a magical castle in Italy where a group of us had been making music and soaking in the golden honey days....
Hiss Golden Messenger Share New Song “Sanctuary”: Stream
Hiss Golden Messenger are back with their first new song since 2019, “Sanctuary”. Written and produced by bandleader M.C. Taylor, “Sanctuary” isn’t exactly a political track, though it does engage with the national mood. “Feeling bad, feeling blue,” Taylor begins, “Can’t get out of my own mind/ but I know how to sing about it.” There’s a tension in the song between uplifting music and lyrical pessimism. At the chorus, backup singers join Taylor, and you might mistake the song for a sunny anthem if you didn’t listen to the words: “You want good news/ You want sanctuary/ But when you try to get real/ They break you on the wheel.” In a statement, Taylor explained how the song came together and paid homage to John Prine, writing, “Over the past year, I’ve been thinking a lot about how we ...
Toledo Share New Song “Dog Has Its Day”: Stream
Although they share a name with the Ohio city, Toledo are a band from Brooklyn. The duo of Daniel Alvarez and Jordan Dunn-Pilz are in the midst of rolling out an EP called Jockeys of Love, and today they’re giving fans a preview with a song called “Dog Has Its Day”. The track follows October’s “Challenger” and December’s “It’s Alive!”, which serve as a solid representation of the sounds that Toledo’s music straddles: brisk, slightly surfy dream-pop and crisp, tranquil indie-folk. “Dog Has Its Day” retains the prettiness of the former, but musically it leans closer to the latter sensibility. Over a mellow yet steady groove, Alvarez and Dunn-Pilz stack a whispery falsetto over a mesmerizing acoustic guitar lick and let that ride for a while. Eventually, some beautifully congealed harmonies e...
The Mountain Goats Perform “Get Famous” On Colbert: Watch
The Mountain Goats made a Friday night appearance on the Late Show with Stephen Colbert to perform their song “Get Famous”. The track was included on the second of two albums they released in 2020, Getting Into Knives. Like all late night performances these days, the set was recorded remotely in a studio and submitted to the program. In addition to frontman John Darnielle and his three core bandmates — Peter Hughes, Jon Wurster, and Matt Douglas — the group was joined by two additional saxophone players to fill out the blaring woodwinds in this upbeat anthem. Back when the band released “Get Famous” as a single in September, Darnielle opened up about how fulfilling it was to create: “If I told you all how much fun we had making this one you wouldn’t even believe me, but we hope it comes th...
