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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

Music

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

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)

The Wants

Introducing: The Wants’ “The Motor”

K Nkanza Hansen is a musician and visual artist from Maryland. They’re the producer and multi-instrumentalist behind projects Spring Silver and Blonde Duluth. As of May 2020, they have graduated from University of Maryland, Baltimore County with a BFA in Visual Arts.

Spring Silver

Introducing: Blonde Duluth’s “She’s Gone”

Alex Ebert (award-winning film composer), Edward Sharpe (platinum-selling hippy), Alexander (indie folk-rapper), Ima Robot (androgynous punk) — it’s all the same dude.
For two decades, Ebert has created original music in myriad forms, styles, shapes, and sounds. From his earliest days as an emcee to the early-aughts buzz of Ima Robot, to the world-beating heights of Edward Sharpe &amp; The Magnetic Zeros, the critically acclaimed Alexander solo project, the Golden Globe-winning neoclassical film score composition for 2014’s All is Lost, and beyond, Ebert’s ability to lose himself in his art and achieve success is undeniable. Transcending boundary lines in the spirit of self-examination, he has spent the better part of the last few years completing a daunting amount of work, including four EPs, a biographical documentary feature film, and culminating with a genre-defying double-album of new material called 5AME!.

Alex Ebert

In Alex Ebert’s New Video, He’s a Roller-Skating Green Screen

Over the course of the last two decades, Detroit&#8217;s ADULT. (Nicola Kuperus and Adam Lee Miller) have been perhaps one of the most fervent proponents of a dark, dance aesthetic that harnesses the perverse aspects of the late &#8217;70s analog dystopian post-modernism.

ADULT.

Introducing: ADULT.’s “Total Total Damage”

Che Apalache is a Grammy-nominated string band based in Buenos Aires with members from Argentina, Mexico, and the United States.

Che Apalache

Argentina’s Day of Remembrance Recalls a Ghastly Past

Mav Karlo is a new project from Menno Versteeg, a Toronto musician and the founder of Royal Mountain Records. His debut full length as Mav Karlo will be released in the summer of 2020.
(Photo Credit: Calm Elliott-Armstrong)

Mav Karlo

Wolf Parade and Menno Versteeg on the Economics of Being a Musician

Blushh was never Shab’s plan. Shab Ferdowsi started writing songs in 2015 as a joke before moving to Ireland for a month. She thought it would be funny if she could make some money busking on the streets of Galway while she was abroad. Well, she didn’t make a lot of money, but she did get into the habit of songwriting every single day. When she came back to LA with those new songs, her friends offered to join her band so she decided to give this a shot. 
In the fall of 2016 she bought an electric guitar, recorded “Are We Too Far?” in her friend’s garage, and played her first full band show.
In 2017, Blushh released its first EP It’s Fine, followed by a split EP with Maddie Ross that fall. In 2018, Shab learned what power chords are and that’s what you hear when you listen to her 2nd EP, Thx 4 Asking. That fall, the full band headed out on their first West Coast tour.
Within the next nine months, the band (now consisting of Skyler Garn on lead guitar, Kenzo Cardenas on bass, and Arturs Reirs on drums) went on two more West Coast tours, played SXSW in Austin as an official artist, performed at Treefort Festival in Boise to a crowd singing along to Shab’s lyrics, and recorded a full length album.
Blushh’s debut LP R.I.P. Apathy will be out in April 2020 and is the band’s most collaborative project yet.

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