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Talkhouse

<div class="c-message__content c-message__content--feature_sonic_inputs" data-qa="message_content">The glitchy pop duo HXXS craft experimental tones with deafening synths and aggressive drums that melts the mind and moves the feet. Their politically charged debut album Year Of The Witch (out Oct 18 via Captured Tracks) sounds as turbulent as it’s heavy subject matter. </div>
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HXXS

Music

Introducing: HXXS’s Creepy New Stop-Motion Video For “Last Days of Magic”

Montreal-based singer-songwriter, producer and multi-instrumentalist Geoffroy makes a point, in both life and music, to weave a tale with his words; one that asks audiences to dig deep.
Following his EP Soaked In Gold (2015), Geoffroy released his debut album Coastline in March 2017, earning critical and commercial success while the album landed on the Polaris Music Prize long list and garnered 25 million streams.
In the two years since Coastline, Geoffroy and his band experienced a groundswell of support in Quebec, culminating in a sold-out headlining show at Montreal’s MTelus (FKA Metropolis). They toured 1000-2000 capacity venues in Europe with Fakear and Møme, and also started to write the next album. Audiences in Mexico, the United States, Brazil, and Germany grew organically and showed enthusiasm for the Montrealer’s music. His single &#8220;Sleeping on My Own&#8221; was a big sensation, racking up over eight million streams on Spotify.
(Photo Credit: Alex Dozois)

Geoffroy

Introducing: Geoffroy’s “The Fear of Falling Apart”

Itasca’s Kayla Cohen wrote the anticipated follow-up to her acclaimed 2016 album Open to Chance in a century-old adobe house in rural New Mexico. Inspired by the landscape and history of the Four Corners region, the sublime Spring — its title summoning both season and scarce local water sources — dowses a devotional path to high desert headwaters. Featuring contributions from Chris Cohen, Cooper Crain (Bitchin’ Bajas), James Elkington, and members of Gun Outfit and Sun Araw, Spring contains Cohen’s most quietly dazzling and self-assured set of songs to date.
<div class="yj6qo ajU">(Photo Credit: Joanne Kim)</div>

Itasca

Introducing: Itasca’s “Lily”

Retail Space is Isabelle and Jacob Rosse. Their latest album, In The Lotia, is out September 20, 2019.

Retail Space

Hear First: Retail Space’s In The Lotia

There&#8217;s a difficult to describe, yet timeless quality to certain songs that transcends genre or era. It&#8217;s something that you can&#8217;t fake or contrive and it&#8217;s what lies at the core of Skating Polly&#8216;s music. The multi-instrumentalist duo of Kelli Mayo and Peyton Bighorse started their band in Oklahoma in 2009. They recorded their debut album Taking Over The World in 2010 and achieved instant acclaim from underground music icons like X&#8216;s Exene Cervenka (who produced 2013&#8217;s Lost Wonderfuls) and Beat Happening&#8216;s Calvin Johnson (who produced 2014&#8217;s Fuzz Steliacoom). After the release of 2016&#8217;s The Big Fit, Veruca Salt&#8216;s co-frontwomen Louise Post and Nina Gordon reached out and said they wanted to write with the band. What started as a writing session ultimately became 2017’s New Trick EP. Then, armed with a third member — Kelli’s brother Kurtis Mayo — the trio released their latest full length, The Make It All Show in 2018.
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The band&#8217;s latest record, Chaos County Line, is out now.

Skating Polly

Introducing: Skating Polly’s “Classless Act”

The heart of An Horse’s magic is rubbery and elastic. Rows of slinky, hypnotic spirals, widening middle-out. They’ve never spun to more vibrant and dynamic impact than on their third album Modern Air.
Loosely from wherever-you’re-seeing-them-play-tonight-by-way-of-Brisbane-to-Montreal-and-New-York, Kate &amp; Damon woke up from a six-year nap to make their best, broadest and most accomplished album, doubling-down on and clarifying their strongest strengths while casually developing and showcasing a career’s-worth of new ones.
Before their 6 year break, An Horse were two albums into their career and touring non-stop with the likes of Tegan and Sara, Death Cab for Cutie, Silversun Pickups, Nada Surf, Cage the Elephant, and Brand New when a series of distracting life events forced them into a hiatus of sorts. That hiatus led to an extended break from touring and recording that’s finally ending with their 2019 album Modern Air, out May 3 on Lame-O Records.
The songs on their new record manage to be both propulsive and loping, lean mission statements about negotiating modern living easter-egged with intelligence and humor, melodic and percussive ear candy, heart and teeth, hope and anger.
They sound like themselves, two-headed and singularly focused, a particularly effective evolutionary step in a long tradition of of guitar-based indie-rock, angular in spaces, jangly in others, sometimes both at the same time. They take a familiar vocabulary and teach it new words, one sugary harmony barbed-wired to unflinching insight at a time.
Modern Air is An Horse at their most realized, and it’s right on time. Some naps are worth taking.
(Photo Credit: Amelia Shaw)

An Horse

Introducing: An Horse’s “Started A Fire”

Juiceboxxx is an American artist from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. His forthcoming LP is slated for release on Dangerbird Records in early 2020.
(Photo Credit: Brad Dececco)

Juiceboxxx

Juiceboxxx on “Coinstar Song” and Why He’s Stuck with That Name

It had been 16 years since John Dragonetti had called himself Jack Drag when he dusted off the largely solo entity to release the aptly titled album 2018 last year. The Submarines singer and co-founder had released four full-length albums under the moniker from 1995 to 2002, based out of Boston. The return was a welcome one&#8230; both for Dragonetti himself and for fans, with lead single, “Little Lies [feat. Aimee Mann and Dylan Gardner], racking up over two million streams, airplay on KCRW and guest appearances from Belle &amp; Sebastian’s Sarah Martin on vocals and Mike Sawitzke of The Eels/Dispatch assisting with horn arrangements and mixing.
After The Submarines released their 2011 album, Love Notes/Letter Bombs, Dragonetti turned his focus to composing for film and TV, including the 2018 comedy All About Nina, starring Mary Elizabeth Winstead and Common. It’s still where Dragonetti focuses most of his attentions.
A new Jack Drag EP, Summer of Cuts and Bruises, is set to drop August 30 on Burger Records, to be preceded by lead single, &#8220;It&#8217;s Something&#8221; on August 9, with an animated video by Cult Of Dang. The title-track, which Dragonetti stated is about “standing tall in the face of romantic sabotage,” features Morgan Kibby (M83/White Sea) on guest vocals, with bass and cello from Gabe Noel.

Jack Drag

Introducing: Jack Drag’s “It’s Something”

Sauna is a brand new Toronto based band featuring Zach Bines (Weaves), Braeden Craig (Greys), and Michael le Riche (Fake Palms).
With synths in bright focus, which le Riche both plays and builds, this project marks a departure from the electric guitar-driven sound of Fake Palms. Bines (bass) and Craig (drums), meanwhile, provide a tough and tight complement to this new approach. Minimalist one minute and maximalist the next, the music is rich with suspense and satisfying subversions of expectation.

Sauna

Introducing: Sauna’s “Carousel”

How far does our sentimental strength go? When do we turn to the other without any resistance? What is the breaking point? By showing emotional connections we become vulnerable. Existing together, we cannot conceive without the other. &#8220;I am another you&#8221; is a Mayan thought that blurs the limits of personal bonds, extending individuality to any being that we choose to look in the eyes, allowing us to find something shared in each others stare.
Entre Los Dos is the follow up to critically acclaimed Mujeres (NPR, Pitchfork, Billboard), Y La Bamba&#8216;s most recently released full-length album (February 2019). This EP comes as a collection of portraits, affinities, and new visions birthed during Luz Elena Mendoza&#8216;s frequent stays in the city of Guadalajara, Mexico. These are songs and powerful prayers, created with their purpose being to protect the land and its people, recognize the ancestry that burns in our hearts, and treasure wisdom weaving healthy bonds that reflect self-love with dignity.
Through the veins of front person Mendoza, runs Purepecha blood. Adapting to new environments over and over again, she has become someone who constantly questions and empowers through music: her great teacher and tireless companion.
The creative flow of Entre Los Dos moves without stopping, without resisting its own form. It adapts, migrates, and fuses with its environment and receptors. The adrenaline of a new beginning moves us, but also leaves a fragile space where the fear of being cornered and devoured may exist. When you float in foreign waters, you can not do more than surrender to doubt and become one with the death. The world is dangerous, and even more so when it comes to surrendering blindly to love.
(Photo Credit: Nadev Benjamin)

Y La Bamba

Introducing: Y La Bamba’s “Rios Sueltos”

Ganser combines post-punk workmanship with aesthetic noise rock tendencies, inspired by cinematic visuals and imagist language. Composed of keyboardist/vocalist Nadia Garofalo, bassist/vocalist Alicia Gaines, drummer Brian Cundiff, and guitarist Charlie Landsman, equal parts Space Odyssey and Ghost World, this Chicago-based band channels anxiety’s heightened state to absurd ends.
Their debut, Odd Talk, was released in 2018 on No Trend Records to favorable coverage from The New York Times, Billboard, Stereogum, and other publications. Building on their dissociative disorder namesake, their music is sometimes frenzied (&#8220;PSY OPS&#8221;), but sometimes contemplative (&#8220;Revel&#8221;), probing on questions of anxiety, intimacy, and avoidance.
(Photo Credit: Kirsten Miccoli)

Ganser

Introducing: Ganser’s “Bad Form”

Adam Green is an artistic polymath — a songwriter, filmmaker, visual artist, and poet. As part of New York’s downtown antifolk scene at the end of the nineties, Green made up one half of The Moldy Peaches, who later enjoyed mainstream success via the 2007 Grammy-winning Juno soundtrack. As a solo artist, Green has recorded 10 albums, many of which have become cult hits. His songs have been performed by artists as diverse as The Libertines, Carla Bruni, Kelly Willis, Dean &amp; Britta, and Will Oldham. His 2005 record Gemstones went Gold in Europe.
Green’s paintings and sculptures have been the subject of exhibitions in America, Asia, and Europe, including a 2016 solo-show at the prestigious Fondation Beyeler Museum in Basel, Switzerland. Green first combined his visual aesthetic, psychedelic writings and musical compositions in the The Wrong Ferarri (2010), the first feature film shot entirely on an iPhone. The “screwball tragedy” was described by Rolling Stone magazine as “Fellini on Ketamine” and went on to feature in the curriculum of NYU’s Tisch Film School.
His second feature film, Adam Green’s Aladdin (2016) — an immersive fantasy film starring Macaulay Culkin, Natasha Lyonne, Alia Shawkat, Jack Dishel, and Francesco Clemente and shot entirely on papier-mache sets — was described by Buzzfeed as “the trippiest movie ever made,” while RogerEbert.com called Aladdin “a movie that belongs inside a museum.” An instant cult hit, the movie was screened theatrically in a midnight movie context, at over a hundred of Green’s concerts around the world, as well as the Andy Warhol Museum in Philadelphia.
After first publishing a bilingual volume of his poetry with Suhrkamp Verlag, Green’s newest book War and Paradise is a graphic novel that combines his lyrical and visual vocabulary. The satirical war epic is about the clash of humans with machines, the meeting of spirituality with singularity, and the bidirectional relationship between life and the afterlife. Green’s 10th solo album, Engine of Paradise, is a musical exploration of these same themes. Recorded in Brooklyn, New York, by Loren Humphrey, the forthcoming album reimagines the baroque orchestral style of his early 2000s era records and features performances by James Richardson (MGMT), Florence Welch (Florence + the Machine) and Jonathan Rado (Foxygen).

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