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Talkhouse

Burr Oak is the new project of Chicago-based singer-songwriter Savanna Dickhut who merges together brutally honest, story-driven lyrics with raw, dreamy vocals. Breaking away from her duo-fronted band Elk Walking, Burr Oak is Dickhut’s first-ever venture as a solo artist.
With just two singles out this past year, The Chicago Tribune wrote her songs “show the promise of a songwriter sure of her voice and sound, one that is piercing and deeply relatable and authentic.” To put it simply, Burr Oak resonates by bridging voice with story.
Before the stay-at-home order, Burr Oak played the annual Chicago winter festival Tomorrow Never Knows (they opened for Twain and Buck Meek of Big Thief) and Savanna performed a solo set for Panache Booking&#8217;s &#8220;Village of Love&#8221; Planned Parenthood benefit concert this past Valentine&#8217;s Day.
(Photo Credit: Carl Solether)

Burr Oak

Music

Introducing: Burr Oak’s “Trying”

Floating Room is the musical project of Portland based multidisciplinary Uchinanchu American artist and DIY veteran Maya Stoner. Their newest EP, Tired and True, was written by Stoner and recorded in the summer of 2019 amidst a backdrop of intense transition: She graduated art school, stepped down as president of Portland indie label Good Cheer Records, and wrested creative control of her band from an ex-boyfriend and former guitarist who liked My Bloody Valentine a little too much.
Lead single “Held Open Door” is a meditation on dimming innocence set to jagged guitar pyrotechnics a la Deerhunter and Television. “Freak Show” is a self-professed “pop hit” concerning Stoner’s perceived pariah-dom within Portland’s blindingly white, furtively racist punk scene.
Tired and True is being released independently by Stoner digitally and on vinyl. It features contributions from Jon Scheid (Duck. Little Brother, Duck!, Dreamdecay), Aaron Liu (Two Moons), Jared Ridabock (Anne, Hemingway), and Mo Troper.

Floating Room

Introducing: Floating Room’s “Freakshow”

With his wonderful new album Stardust, Luka Kuplowsky makes a refreshing argument for the relevance of acoustic music as a place to hold thought; an open space to place impeccably chosen words, ideas and images. A young songwriter with a calm, conversational delivery and an effortless, un-showy grasp of poetry; Kuplowsky humbly picks up the same threads of inquiry that did Cohen, asking the big questions about love, meaning and consciousness. Musically, Stardust triangulates between Hejira and Late for the Sky, finding connections between the purity of simple melody and the tangled modulations of jazz. Luka Kuplowsky makes a music of contemplation, a music alive to the everyday possibilities of epiphany and revelation, an unhurried music that moves with the gentle and curving rhythms of thought.
(Photo Credit: Melissa Richards)

Luka Kuplowsky

Introducing: Luka Kuplowsky’s “Stardust (Reprise)”

Sonny Falls is the songwriting project of Chicago DIY veteran Ryan “Hoagie Wesley” Ensley. Hoagie’s writing gives voice to a depleted notion of modern Americana saturated by fortuneless upbringing, tragic devotion, and the untold losses of the opioid epidemic. These themes recur honestly and without pretension in his writing; erected as dark windows into the soul of songs that nonetheless break glass to let the sunshine in. With a graceful balance of honest guitar rock and soulful self-expression, Sonny Falls is a special kind of timeless indie rock.
(Photo Credit: Emma Bilyeu)

Sonny Falls

Introducing: Sonny Falls’ “Plasma Kids”

Famous Letter Writer is the project of award-winning writer and lyricist M.I. Devine and multi-instrumentalist Ru Devine. Their first album, WARHOLA, is out November 11 on Big Deep Records. M.I.&#8217;s book of essays, Warhol&#8217;s Mother&#8217;s Pantry, gets published by Mad Creek Books on November 9, 2020.

Famous Letter Writer

Introducing: Famous Letter Writer’s “Warhol/Warhola”

Kacey Johansing was born in Kalamazoo, Michigan and raised in the mountain towns of Colorado, the daughter of a coal miner and a painter. After leaving Berklee College of Music in Boston, Johansing relocated to the San Francisco Bay Area, where she co-founded the duo Yesway and released two solo albums. Later moving to Los Angeles, Johansing released her third solo album The Hiding in 2017, which received widespread acclaim from critics and listeners alike and garnered comparisons to Fleetwood Mac, Carole King and Prefab Sprout. She subsequently toured internationally and shared the stage with Real Estate and Fruit Bats, and became a frequent touring member of Hand Habits. She is currently preparing for the release of her fourth album on her own Night Bloom Records.

Kacey Johansing

Introducing: Kacey Johansing’s “I Try”

Groupie is a Brooklyn-based band known for turning introspection into kinetic, cathartic sound. Their music fuses the emotional edge of punk with the immersive textures of shoegaze and dream pop — sharp, shimmering, and unafraid of vulnerability. Groupie has become a mainstay in NYC’s indie scene with a sound that merges dream pop sheen and punk urgency. Since the release of their debut album Ephemeral in 2021, they have shared the stage with indie greats like Warpaint, Silversun Pickups, Neon Trees, and many more. Led by bassist and frontwoman Ashley Kossakowski, a queer, first-generation daughter of Polish immigrants, and joined by drummer Aaron Silberstein, and guitarists Eric Rubin and Eamon Lebow, the band’s evolution from the raw immediacy of their debut Ephemeral to their upcoming sophomore album reflects a sound fully in bloom — cinematic in scope, but deeply human at its core.

Groupie

Introducing: Groupie’s “Daleko”

Night Shop is the songwriting project of Justin Sullivan. Sullivan has worked as a touring drummer for the past twenty years, much of which was spent playing house shows, warehouses and art spaces with a half dozen DIY punk bands, including Ringers and an early incarnation of Worriers. In 2009, he joined the Babies alongside Kevin Morby and Cassie Ramone. When the band went on hiatus in 2013, Sullivan moved to Los Angeles with Morby and continued working with him as a staple of the live band and playing on all of Morby&rsquo;s studio albums. In the meantime, Sullivan also formed the fuzz punk outfit Flat Worms, with Tim Hellman of Oh Sees and Will Ivy.&nbsp;In the Break is Night Shop&#8217;s first full length album, following a self-titled EP released in 2017 by 1234 Go! Records.&nbsp;The album was engineered by Jarvis Taveniere of Woods, a longtime collaborator from Sullivan&rsquo;s time in Brooklyn and mixed by Drew Fischer.

Night Shop

Introducing: Night Shop’s “The Cafe of Eternal Youth”

In a time where positivity is hard to come by, The Happy Fits are here with their transportive, sunny second album, What Could Be Better, out August 28. Turning a love for the Killers and Violent Femmes into their own compact pop songwriting, the New Jersey-based trio started as a casual summer project for high school friends Calvin Langman, Ross Monteith, and Luke Davis before going off to college. After their debut EP, 2016’s Awfully Apeelin’, took off on Spotify during their first semester, school stopped looking like the natural next step. Following their 2018 full-length Concentrate, The Happy Fits have further honed their ambition for What Could Be Better’s collection of crowd-pleasers.

The Happy Fits

Calvin Langman of The Happy Fits is Playing Pickleball Like There’s No Tomorrow

Handsome Ghost is the Massachusetts duo of Eddie Byun and Tim Noyes. Their 2014 breakout single “Blood Stutter” racked up 20 million streams, and their debut album Welcome Back followed in 2018. Their second album, Some Still Morning, will be out on Photo Finish Records on September 18, 2020.

Handsome Ghost

Introducing: Handsome Ghost’s “Sunday Best”

In 2003, Theo Hilton was a solo artist playing songs about being queer in front of mostly straight audiences at punk venues around Athens, GA, and the southeast.  What started as an artistic outlet for his own personal experiences became a band called Nana Grizol in 2007, a four-piece punk project birthed from Hilton’s isolated existence as a small town queer boy.
On South Somewhere Else (Arrowhawk/Don Giovanni, 2020) Hilton uses the band’s fourth album to shine a light on the southern queer experience beyond feelings of isolation and onto his own privileged experience as a white man who grew up in a left-leaning, affluent college town. 17 years in, it is not enough for Hilton to simply sing sad love songs about boys, but to examine his personal concept of home, and to look unflinching at his own distant feelings about “the south” and his own complicated history of place.

Nana Grizol

Introducing: Nana Grizol’s “We Carry The Feeling”

With the minimal instrumentation of post-punk as their framework, The Wants inject the hypnotic pulse of Detroit techno into the practice of pop songwriting. Led by Madison Velding-VanDam’s elusive duality of personas, which oscillate between earnestly romantic and unsettlingly deadpan, The Wants naturally forge a dark alley off the beaten path into danceable dissonance. Velding VanDam’s vulnerable lyrics sometimes foray into the sardonically biting, reflecting the complex cycle of self-reflection of the current generation, while drawing from sources like the satire-of-power in Jenny Holzer’s “Inflammatory Essays,” and the midwestern heart of The National’s frontman Matt Berninger. Anthony “Shake” Shakir’s “Frictionalism (1994-2009)&#8221; and John Beltran’s “Ten Days of Blue” drew Velding-VanDam into the lush soundscapes and entrancing mood of electronic music.
The Wants origins are in the musical partnership between drummer Jason Gates and Velding-VanDam who met in 2014 in the Bushwick, Brooklyn DIY scene. Velding-VanDam was new to New York at the time. Their first project together (ONWE) was short lived — while Velding-VanDam retooled and Gates focused on work and his project Veda Rays, Velding-VanDam joined his friend Ben Hozie’s new project BODEGA on guitar and as a producer. Heather Elle was the final member to join The Wants — after a decade in New York, she joined BODEGA where she met Velding-VanDam and the two instantly felt a strong musical chemistry.
For their first three years as a band, The Wants performed exclusively in NYC, often at the Bushwick underground venue Alphaville. Council Records, a brand new London based label, signed The Wants in early 2019 originally for an EP that was expanded into a full length. Following their signing, The Wants traveled to Austin, TX for SXSW 2019 and London and Brighton, UK for The Great Escape 2019.
The Wants’ debut full length Container was released March 2020.
(Photo credit: Madison Carroll)

introducing