Creative

Footer Legal

Main

NavBar

Sections

Topics

Become a subscriber today to get unlimited access

Thanks for reading!

Register to continue

Talkhouse

Ian Everett is a member of the band Solid Bronze. Their debut album The Fruit Basket was released September 13 via Schnitzel Records.&nbsp;
(Photo Credit: Sam DeFalco)

Ian Everett

Music

Gig Economy: Ian Everett of Solid Bronze

Dessa is a rapper, writer, and public speaker whose extraordinary career spans many genres. As a writer, she has contributed to the New York Times, the Star Tribune, the hit podcast Welcome to Night Vale, and literary journals around the country. She’s hosted radio and TV events, delivered keynote speeches around the country, contributed to The Hamilton Mixtape, and tried every dessert that was ever offered to her. Dessa has toured North America, Europe, Australia, China, and South Africa, both as a solo artist and as a proud member of the Doomtree hip-hop collective.
In August of 2019, <a class="c-link" href="https://slack-redir.net/link?url=http%3A%2F%2FTED.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">TED.com</a> featured a talk on heartbreak and neuroscience that Dessa delivered in Hong Kong. In the weeks since, her speech, titled &#8220;Can We Choose to Fall Out of Love,&#8221; has accrued more than a million views. Other recent career accomplishments include 2018’s acclaimed album Chime, a Super Bowl 2018 performance, in spring of 2019, she performed her sixth straight sold-out show with the Minnesota Orchestra at Orchestra Hall.  The Utne Reader called her simply a “one-woman powerhouse.”
(Photo Credit: Matthew Levine)

Dessa

Three Great Things: Dessa

Formed in New Brunswick, NJ in 2005, Screaming Females are Marissa Paternoster (guitar, vox), Mike Abbate (bass), and Jarrett Dougherty (drums). Over six albums and more than a decade of music making, the band has remained deeply individual and steadfastly DIY. They have also grown into one of the most dynamic and devastating touring bands going today.

Screaming Females

Three Great Things: Screaming Females

Shamir is Shamir and remains Shamir through and through, no matter what the universe puts him through. You may know the singularly named artist (think—Madonna or Cher) from his 2015 debut hit record Rachet, beloved by NPR listeners and club kids alike. After quickly rising to underground fame with his Northtown EP in 2014, the DIY pop star made a sonic splash with Rachet’s lead single “On The Regular,” a poppy banger that had extensive commercial usage. But how to follow all that up? Shamir, who came from the dusty dunes of Las Vegas, to Brooklyn’s Silent Barn, to the Philly indie scene (and all over the world in between), wanted to go back to what had inspired him from the beginning. Outsider music, country &amp; punk. Raw and vulnerable tunes, stripped down to their emotional core. 2017’s Revelations explored a new avenue of guitar driven hooky indie rock and was widely critically praised in the US and overseas.
Shamir’s most recent releases, the brilliant Room 7” on Father/Daughter, and his self-released limited edition album, Resolution, are pinnacles in the catalog of the increasingly fascinating artist’s career. Room and its b-side Caballero celebrate Shamir’s love of country music, while Resolution is a deeply introspective look into the fabric of society and the artists’ own mind.  With these two releases he has refined his craft exponentially and done so in less than six months from the release of Revelations.

Shamir Bailey

Ratchet TV: Hello, Privilege. It’s Me, Chelsea

Saul Williams has been breaking ground since his debut album, Amethyst Rock Star, which was released in 2001 and executive produced by Rick Rubin. After gaining global fame for his poetry and writings at the turn of the century, Williams has performed in over thirty&nbsp;countries and read in over three hundred&nbsp;universities, with invitations that have spanned from the White House, the Sydney Opera House, Lincoln Center, The Louvre, The Getty Center, Queen Elizabeth Hall, to countless villages, townships, community centers, and prisons across the world. The Newburgh, New York, native gained a BA from Morehouse and an MFA from Tisch, and has gone on to record with Nine Inch Nails and Allen Ginsburg and has performed in numerous film and television&nbsp;roles.

Saul Williams

Three Great Things: Saul Williams

On their new self-titled EP, Swimming With Bears deliver a batch of five songs that showcase the next chapter as a band: truth and escapism. But beneath the vulnerability and personal lyrics are upbeat and fun tracks that everyone can relate to.
The self-titled EP due out later this year via Cinematic Records, marks a period of major growth for Swimming With Bears, who spent the better part of the last few years honing there craft in the writing room as well as on tour, highlighted by press like Nylon who praised them as “Swimming With Bears knows this and turned it into a glistening alt. rock anthem. Oh la la, indeed.” In bringing the new EP to life, they worked closely with producer Ryan Hadlock (produced for Lumineers, Vance Joy), immersing themselves in a more thorough recording process than they ever attempted before.
As a result of the new project, Swimming with Bears created a new genre they like to call “Pop N Roll” that is a little bit of Indie rock, a little bit of pop and always a damn good time.

Swimming With Bears

Gig Economy: Swimming With Bears

Chastity Belt’s energy is like a circuit, circling around the silly and the sincere. Tongue-in-cheek shit-shooting and existential rumination feed into each other infinitely.
Theirs is a long-term relationship, and that loop sustains them. That’s a creative thesis in and of itself, but isn’t that also just the mark of a true-blue friendship?
The band talks a lot about intention these days — how to be more present with each other. The four piece — Julia Shapiro (vocals, guitar, drums), Lydia Lund (vocals, guitar), Gretchen Grimm (drums, vocals, guitar) and Annie Truscott (bass) — is nine years deep in this, after all. It seems now, more than ever, that circuit is a movement of intentionality, one that creates a space inside which they can be themselves, among themselves. It’s a space where the euphoria of making music with your best friends is protected from the outside world’s churning expectations. It’s a kind of safe zone for the band to occupy as their best selves: a group of friends who love each other.
Their fourth record, Chastity Belt, comes out of that safe space. With the luxury of spending several weeks in the studio with Jay Som’s Melina Duterte, Chastity Belt was able to experiment. The result is their most sonically developed and nuanced record yet; one that’s not only a product of, but a series of reflections on what it means to take what you need and to understand yourself better.

Chastity Belt

Three Great Things: Chastity Belt

Negativland&#8216;s True False will be out October 25.

Negativland

Three Great Things: Negativland

Ratchet TV: Aziz Ansari: Right Now

As with so many artistic endeavors, Ada Lea’s debut album began as one thing and ended up as something else. The commonality of that process doesn’t make the story any less interesting, however, especially in the case of what we say in private — a beautifully colorful collection of profound pop songs that will be released later this summer via her new Saddle Creek home.
The Montreal, Quebec-based Alexandra Levy — who records and performs as Ada Lea — is also a painter and visual artist, and traces of her many creative abilities run throughout what we say in private. To her, music and visual art are different vessels for communicating similar ideas. Levy’s appreciation of female artists — including the writer Sylvia Plath, visual artists Frida Kahlo and Eva Hesse, and musicians Karen Dalton and Nina Simone — provides inspiration and guidance, informing her use of multiple artforms as tools for self-expression. Through all her work, Levy explores the concept of womanhood as it feels and looks to her, as well as love and how it transforms over time. She doesn’t shy away from exploring uncomfortable and painful emotions, either. With the brightness of love, strength, and hope contrasted with the darkness of loss, suffering, isolation, and abandonment, what we say in private is a varied and vivid record that constantly seems to shift in the light, bringing together all the intricate influences she’s collected over the years.
Levy delivers something very special on what we say in private. Bold and daring, but also gentle and vulnerable, the album finds new ways of presenting its vision from one inspired idea to the next, a big leap into the wider world with passion and exuberance.
(Photo Credit: Bao Ngo)

Ada Lea

Three Great Things: Ada Lea

Born and raised in the border city of Chula Vista, California, Jackie Mendoza blends the cultural influences of her hometown and her motherland of Tijuana, Mexico, creating eccentric pop, Latin-driven dance beats, and vibrant soundscapes. She’s been involved in music since she was young, listening to Latin-pop songs at family parties, and playing in bands in high school. It wasn’t until she took a course for Ableton in college that she discovered an avid interest in producing and making beats. Since then, Mendoza has been experimenting with electronic ukulele-based pop, expanding the sound to its maximum potential by layering it with beats while singing in both English and Spanish.
Mendoza’s LuvHz EP is a six track exploration of love and relationships through personal experiences and observations. She recorded the EP with Rusty Santos (Panda Bear’s Buoys), a collaborator that Mendoza quickly realized she had many parallels with. Both have lived in LA, NY, and Mexico and have an appreciation for Latin producers and Reggaeton artists, sounds that perfectly translated into Mendoza’s music.
(Photo Credit: Tayo Oyekan)

Jackie Mendoza

Three Great Things: Jackie Mendoza

Not much is known of the LA-based male/female duo Emotional Oranges, but it has been speculated that when Adele’s vocal coach and Drake’s engineer met at a bat mitzvah in 2017, the band was instantly born. A mix of funky bass, break-beat drums and jazzy guitars creates a refreshing, retro sound with futuristic undertones. Michelle Obama and Guy Fieri have both publicly championed the band. Their debut singles, “Motion” and “Personal” immediately created a cult following, generating over 12 million streams globally. “Motion” was made the official theme song for RuPaul’s Drag Race in 2018.

music column