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Talkhouse

GUPPY is an LA-based sound recognizable for its driving rhythms, catchy melodies, and playful lyrics sure to leave you thinking “GUPPY IS MY FRIEND.” The four-piece rock band captures the essence of versatility from their first basement show in Boston, MA to some of the most popular punk rock venues in Los Angeles.
<div class="yj6qo ajU">(Photo Credit: Yasmina Hilal)</div>

GUPPY

Music

Hear First: GUPPY’s In Heat

On the heels of a nonstop year of performances that landed them on Oh My Rockness’s list of New York City’s Hardest Working Bands of 2018, Desert Sharks are releasing their first full-length album. Baby’s Gold Death Stadium juxtaposes elements from iconic ‘90s bands Sleater-Kinney, L7, Veruca Salt, and Toadies with Desert Sharks’ own musical history. Named for DIY venues and small stages they’ve regularly played over the years, the album is an edgier, more organic effort from the Brooklyn-based foursome.
Baby’s Gold Death Stadium showcases their guitar-driven brand of grunge-garage punk as a perfect synthesis of their individual talents. Charged by guitarists Stefania Rovera and Sunny Veniero’s fiercely relentless compositions, the LP is grounded by formidable rhythms from drummer Rebecca Fruchter as well as the introspective songwriting style of bassist and lead singer Stephanie Gunther.
The album was recorded at Spice World by Jordan Lovelace. Mixed and Mastered by Jonathan Schenke. In support of Baby’s Gold Death Stadium, Desert Sharks will return to the road in the fall of 2019.

Desert Sharks

Hear First: Desert Sharks’ Baby’s Gold Death Stadium

Many an aspiring musician has cursed his or her day job. Not indie folk artist Luke Hogan. His career as a carpenter has helped him to build his career as a musician. For Luke, a fortuitous turn of events enabled him to finance his imaginatively textured debut record, Thank You Stranger, by bartering his skills and building the studio it would soon be recorded in.
Thank You, Stranger is a folk album with songs that have blossomed with intriguing arrangements, and bold textural touches such as strings, synthetic atmospherics, and non-traditional percussion. Thematically, the album manages to be paradoxically personal and opaque.
Pondering the release of his debut album, Luke says: “I connect with records on a very personal level. My hope for this record is that it may be there for others in the same way that some of my favorite records were there for me. To me, that would mean ‘success.’”
(Photo Credit: Callie Bowen)

Luke Hogan

Hear First: Luke Hogan’s Thank You, Stranger

Two summers ago, Stella Kortchmar started making Admirer. Kortchmar and co-producer Mike Dvorscak knew they wanted to make a full-length electronic pop record, a collection of songs tied to the better parts of the warmer months. Between Albany and White Plains, New York, the duo spent the long summer days writing, recording, and polishing the LP while following a recipe: Build the songs up, strip them back down, add extra ingredients (harmonies, synth pads, collegiate samples) with ease and purpose. Most importantly, indulge in the collaborative nature of it all. The outcome is a tiered cake, nuanced, layered, and light — familiar in structure and unique in taste.
Admirer thrives on a relaxed kind of energy, the kind that kicks in from lounging around in the late afternoon and remembering you’ve got plans in a few hours. Optimism is dripping from every surface like cave stalactites during a heatwave: “DayDream” is for letting go of a fantasy when reality has caught up to it; “Out Of Town” is for holding on to a partner to escape problems at home. Silver linings are in high supply — you just have to listen for them.
Additionally, the recipe called for outside talent. In the words of Kortchmar, “When you’re unsure of where a song is headed, the best thing to do is bring someone else in.” Admirer features the varied stylings of indie pop summoner Half Waif, guitar mages Blue Ranger and Russel the Leaf, and Devoye, a jack-of-all-trades on the 1s and 2s. Just as the middle months colored the entire record, the guest musicians color the middle third of the album, right when Kortchmar and Dvorscak find their spot in the sunlight. The record closes out with “Haircut,” a reserved goodbye and a reminder, ultimately, that you can always create your own warmth if the cold’s not cutting it.
Together Kortchmar and Dvorscak form the production duo “beachball” — of which Admirer is the first fully realized project.
(Photo Credit: Joseph Charles Viola)

Stella Emmett

Hear First: Stella Emmett’s Admirer

New York-based producer, composer and sound artist Nick Zanca has been releasing music under the name Mister Lies since 2012. The project began in a Chicago dorm room with the release of a four-track EP, Hidden Neighbors — over the years, his sounds have inhabited a specific intersection between intimacy and atmosphere through a maximalist mosaic of field recordings, sample-based textures, glitchy soundscapes, and nocturnal pop songs.
After a five-year personal hiatus, Zanca returns to his project’s roots with a home-recorded, self-titled and self-released third LP. Realized over the course of a year and explicitly designed as a start-to-finish listen, Mister Lies is a study of capturing the present and a celebration of the art of recording itself. Field recordings and found sounds are intertwined with electroacoustic improvisations and lyrics lifted from journal entries to form a half-hour genre-agnostic montage of memory. Bells sound, birds gossip, trains pass and boats rev their engines — this is kinetic, fluid music that promotes deep listening and headphone time travel.
(Photo Credit: Brian Vu)

Mister Lies

Hear First: Mister Lies’s Mister Lies

Fallow Land is an Ann Arbor, MI-based rock band. Their debut LP Slow Down, Rockstar is out July 2019 via Spartan Records.

Fallow Land

Hear First: Fallow Land’s Slow Down, Rockstar

Wound deep within the anthemically angular indie-punk of Oakland-based two-piece band Shutups is a story of resilience and deep friendship. Singer/songwriter/guitarist Hadley and drummer Mia were college buddies pulled apart due to simple geography, but reunited after Hadley suffered a medical emergency that left him walking with a cane and hiding from the sun for two years. Three years later, Shutups announce its debut, Every Day I&#8217;m Less Zen.
Shutups pools from shared influences such as Fugazi, Paul McCartney and Wings, Elliott Smith, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and Diarrhea Planet. The band’s mix of lush instrumentation and imaginative arrangements stays visceral courtesy of Mia’s drumming which is both caveman and keenly attuned to each track’s jagged twists and turns.
To date, Shutups has released four EPs. The pair’s debut long player is a watershed release that benefits from careful reflection and an unrushed studio schedule. Every Day I’m Less Zen was produced by Cody Votolato, the guitarist from the post-hardcore group The Blood Brothers who recently produced Dude York’s 2017 release, Sincerely.
Up next, Shutups will hit the road and likely return soon to the studio as a follow up album has been fully written.
(Photo Credit: Nate Gilchrest)

Shutups

Hear First: Shutups’ Every Day I’m Less Zen

Lost Lander is the project of Matt Sheehy (Ramona Falls, EL VY). He produced Aberdeen, the third album released under the moniker, and pulled together collaborators — including bandmate Sarah Fennell, Drew Shoals (Train), Brent Knopf (EL VY, Ramona Falls, Menomena), Holly Sheehy, Dave Depper (Death Cab For Cutie), Scott Magee (Ural Thomas and the Pain), Dana Bouy (Akron/Family), and Justin Miller.

Lost Lander

Hear First: Lost Lander’s Aberdeen

NYC-based Philadelphia-bred indie electronic artist Instupendo floats into earshot with original compositions that listeners turn to when they feel, or want to feel, a certain way. Simultaneously euphoric and melancholy, this distinctive emotional sound design has earned Instupendo a world-wide following; the admiration of fellow artists, including notable collaborators such as Grammy-winners RAC and Rostam as well as indie friends like Benny Sings, Lontalius, Roy Blair, and Teen Daze; nods from The FADER, Pigeons &amp; Planes, Pitchfork, Indie Shuffle, High Snobiety, and The 405; spotlights on SiriusXM and BBC6, and as regular features on Spotify, Apple Music, TIDAL, and Majestic Casual. He’s performed at SXSW, and supported Rostam, Shallou, George Fitzgerald, Ryan Hemsworth x Giraffage, and Snail Mail.
2019 has seen Instupendo featuring on Toro Y Moi’s Outer Peace LP and in Urban Outfitter’s Teenage Engineering OP-Z launch campaign. His Boys by Girls EP, out June 5, is the first to feature his own vocals and finds him continuing to forge his own unique path, artfully blending genres and experimenting with stylistic diversity. Instupendo’s new material will be front and center when he joins Golden Vessel’s 21-city North American tour this summer (tour details: <a href="https://fanlink.to/SLOWSHINETOUR_Tickets" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://fanlink.to/SLOWSHINETOUR_Tickets&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1559668597041000&amp;usg=AFQjCNGhq1b8Opwvq1tcNhTyNR5U069n7w">https://fanlink.to/SLOWSHINETOUR_Tickets</a>).

Instupendo

Hear First: Instupendo’s Boys by Girls

Grant Pavol is a prolific 19 year old singer-songwriter and Philadelphia native. Coming from an artistic family, Grant was constantly surrounded by music and taught himself guitar during his early teen years. Pavol started to cut his teeth in the Philly music scene around the age of 15. He attended DIY shows around the city, one of his first being a basement show which happened to be singer-songwriter Shamir first show in Philadelphia. Soon after, the two began to develop a friendship as they frequently saw each other at shows.
Currently in college, Pavol began writing confessional acoustic pop songs in his bedroom. Equal parts Elliott Smith and Nick Drake, Grant’s hushed vocals and lyrical melodies carry the sincerity of his sound. After sending Shamir demos via Facebook in the summer of 2018, the duo quickly tracked all five songs for Pavol’s debut EP Okay, the release being one of the first releases for Shamir&#8217;s label Accidental Popstar Records.
(Photo Credit: Mooj Zadie)

Grant Pavol

Hear First: Grant Pavol’s Okay

Field Medic is the LA-based folk singer-songwriter Kevin Patrick Sullivan. He&#8217;ll be touring spring 2026 in support of his latest album, surrender instead, out now.
(Photo Credit: Julian Larkin)

Field Medic

Hear First: Field Medic’s fade into the dawn

Reese McHenry is a Chapel Hill-based singer/songwriter known for her work in the Dirty Little Heaters, Spider Bags, and The Second Wife. In 2009, she was diagnosed with Atrial Fibrillation, an irregular or quivering heartbeat; that same year, with a loss of speech, a lethargic and often useless left side, and the failure of her memory, she found out she had suffered at least one major stroke and likely several smaller ones in the intervening months. 
In 2012, after doctors installed a pacemaker to regulate her heartbeat, McHenry began to slowly find her way back to the rock &amp; roll path from which she was forced to stray; by 2017, after nearly a decade of trying, McHenry released the first album under her own name, Bad Girl, which has become her most celebrated to date. 
Still armed with hundreds of songs from her years spent on the couch, McHenry started to furiously book shows, making up for years lost to her debilitating illness. Soon, she found herself in North Carolina’s famed Fidelitorium studio alongside beloved producer/engineer Missy Thangs. Backed by Raleigh rockers Drag Sounds, the crew cut the fourteen songs that would become her new album, No Dados, over six days.

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