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Talkhouse

Allen Stone is a singer-songwriter from Chewelah, Washington. He has released four albums, the latest of which is Building Balance.

Allen Stone

Music

Three Great Things: Allen Stone

Jenny Owen Youngs is a singer-songwriter whose latest EP Night Shift includes an ode to the state fair staple The Gravitron. She also hosts the popular Buffy The Vampire Slayer podcast Buffering The Vampire Slayer.
(Photo Credit: Tucker Leary)

Jenny Owen Youngs

Three Great Things: Jenny Owen Youngs

Varsity came to fruition one night in 2013 when several Chicago musicians gathered for a &#8220;salon night&#8221; where friends shared stories and songs. Singer-keyboardist Stephanie Smith was set to perform solo, but was quickly drawn to the sound of guitarists Dylan Weschler and Pat Stanton and asked them to join her. Shortly after their first performance as a trio, they recruited Jake Stolz on drums and his brother, Paul Stolz, on bass to fully round out their sound and become the quintet that they are today. Varsity played shows in the Chicago area the following year and spent one weekend at Chicago&#8217;s Public House Studio to record their debut self-titled LP released in March 2015.
Varsity has since found success in the growing indie-pop space. The powerful driving vocals of singer/keyboardist Stephanie Smith over infectious guitar melodies and exciting rhythm has them frequently sharing bills with artists including American Wrestlers, Alvvays, Courtney Barnett, The Hold Steady, and Car Seat Headrest. The band has further explored and developed their sound across a variety of digital releases—often two complementary singles at a time —that have earned rave reviews and a growing audience with millions of plays on YouTube and Spotify.
(Photo Credit: Alexa Viscius)

Varsity

Three Great Things: Varsity

Fatima Al Qadiri is a New York-based artist, musician and composer.
(Photo Credit: Dom Smith)

Fatima Al Qadiri

Three Great Things: Fatima Al Qadiri

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

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.

music column