Attachment Theory, features 11 tracks that analyze and reflect on the barriers we face when dealing with others as potential life partners. Dating is hard. Sellers has noted, “This record was born out of heartbreak, with the theme of attachment theory running through it in different ways. I’ve always been fascinated by psychology, especially people’s personalities and quirks, and how they function in relationships.” These songs address the issues creatively and thematically, but Sellers takes things one step further by launching a podcast series that explores the psychological theories behind such behavior for each of the 11 songs.
The first episode of Attachment Theory: The Podcast, “Villain of the Week”, delves into how dating apps attract emotionally unavailable…
Category: americana
The latest from the Nashville-based duo Paper Wings will reward fans who embraced their signature amalgamation of literate folk with bluegrass, as well as their lyrical willingness to explore the territory beneath the thin veil of decency people and societies present. On Mountains on the Moon, though, the prevailing themes are longing and abiding resilience through individual strength. A stern sense of self-reliance and clear-eyed hope may be the most political statement of the album – songwriting partners Emily Mann and Wila Frank have plumbed depths both personal and universal before. Here, they seek defiance through resolve and eschew despair in favour of cautious optimism.
The opener, ‘Fumbling’ alliteratively asks…
The pressures an artist or band faces when releasing a debut album have been discussed in countless articles. Still, when it comes to young shoegaze hopefuls Ringing and their Julia’s War Recordings-released LP Another Cycle in the Cosmic Wash, there are even more layers of stress for the band to deal with. What started as a noisy solo project built on experimenting with the limits of the middle ground between alt-rock and shoegaze has blossomed into a youthful, promising trio. Although for Colton Walker, Marcos Rocha, and Josh Matthews, the mission has stayed the same since Ringing uploaded their first songs to Bandcamp in 2020: leave their mark on what is slowly becoming a contemporary shoegaze revival.
This is not only Ringing’s debut album…
John Hollier hails from Louisiana, and though there are hints of his roots in his sound, it is mostly easy-flowing Americana music. After all, he and his band, John Hollier & The Reverie, wrote much of and recorded Rainmaker in Nashville. The band name stems from the French word, ‘rever,’ which means ‘’to dream,” a descriptor of being lost in thoughts, or daydreaming. Thus, the bulk of the album has a meditative quality, though they fire up occasionally,
Hollier took his road band, unseasoned in session work, into the studio to record live. Hollier is on guitar and lead vocals with Teddy Thebedoux Jones (sax). Zachary Scott Cline (lead guitar), Ray Akers (bass), and Brian Cox (drums). Hollier wrote all the songs, some in conjunction with bandmates…
On his own, Tony Trischka is considered one of the world’s foremost banjo players.
He is comfortable paying tribute to tradition of bluegrass pioneers while also stepping outside the box and innovating. To his own substantial body of work, Trischka adds two mammoth tribute projects: the 2023, Grammy-nominated Earl Jam, followed by Earl Jam 2.
…Both albums are built around a remarkable discovery: a cache of previously unheard recordings of Earl Scruggs and John Hartford informally jamming at Scruggs’ home between 1987 and 1998. Earl Jam 2 features 15 newly selected performances drawn from the same archive, spanning traditional standards, deep-cut fiddle tunes, and iconic American songs…
The All-Night Costume Company, the ninth solo effort from Tacoma, WA’s Kye Alfred Hillig, is the album that almost wasn’t.
After the release of his double LP in 2022, Hillig was feeling disillusioned and stepped away from music for the first time in more than 20 years. But quitting didn’t stick and instead served, in part, as a source for new material. Throughout the dozen songs here, Hillig weaves in themes of perseverance and getting by. In the first moments of the album, on “The Horrible Truth,” he puts vulnerabilities and existential dread over a mid-tempo beat. It’s not the best track on the album, but it offers a map of what’s to follow — stark, sometimes painfully honest truths of life over a solid indie rock soundtrack. But there is also…
“Johnny can do what he wants,” Sturgill Simpson told Uncut when his new alias debuted on 2024’s Passage Du Desir, which found him rolling through Paris streets “like a cork in a bottle” while listening to ‘70s soft rock and Serge Gainsbourg.
His first five albums proper had burned Nashville bridges during an odyssey through outlaw country, psychedelia, synths and Kentucky bluegrass, while tracing the five metaphysical phases of the Western soul.
Johnny Blue Skies blew this preordained cycle away. He feels more real this time round, not as a Ziggy-style persona but as a means of instantaneous, unshackled creation. Mutiny After Midnight is a dirty boudoir record, a Southern take on Emotional Rescue, staged in a small-town…
Country music fans will tell you, there’s country music, and there’s Texas country music. They are not the same thing. Just because someone’s from the Lone Star state doesn’t make one a Texas country artist. Defining just what Texas music is can be difficult. It is characterized more by what it is not, almost more than what it is (grittier than Nashville production, populated by self-described outlaws, more honky-tonk danceable than ballad driven, etc.).
Because Texas music contains elements of pop (Buddy Holly), rock (ZZ Top), folk (Nanci Griffiths), gospel (Beyoncé), R&B (Leon Bridges), blues (Stevie Ray Vaughn), jazz (Lyle Lovett), ad infinitum, it’s hard to find a unifying principal that binds all of these artists together other…
…Just 24, Natalie Del Carmen has already released two albums, a couple of singles, and an EP. She hails from Los Angeles, where she returned to after gaining a Bachelor’s degree in Music (with a songwriting focus) from the famed Berklee College of Music in Boston.
This explains her talent for wordplay in exploring themes of adulthood, self-discovery, and personal growth, wrapped in a series of glorious tunes. Her debut, Bloodline, was possibly a more simplistic album lyrically (most of which was written when del Carmen was in her teens and much more influenced by ‘pop’ music). That album came out in March 2023 and received a positive reception from critics and fans alike, who noted her voice and her way with a tune. An EP entitled…
Flying Mojito Bros released The Swamp Fox, an album featuring their remixes of recordings by late singer-songwriter Tony Joe White. Tony Joe White, known as The Swamp Fox, was a native of Louisiana and wrote such noteworthy songs as “Polk Salad Annie,” “Undercover Agent for the Blues” and “Rainy Night in Georgia.” White died in 2018 at age 75. White’s son and official archivist, Jody White, contacted Flying Mojito Bros (London-based duo Ben Chetwood and Jack Sellen) to collaborate with them on the remix album.
…”During the late 70’s and early 80’s, Tony Joe was blending country, swamp and disco into his own recipe of funky dance music,” Jody White explains. “With some help from the Flying Mojito Bros, these songs are about to see the light…
Lolly Lee began her career playing rhythm guitar and providing the vocals for The Mortals and Split the Dark, regionally successful rock bands from the South, throughout the 1980’s. She married and dropped out of the music business whilst raising a family, and followed other pursuits, though continuing to write songs. This is now her second solo album, released following the death of her husband in 2023. The songs and their themes demonstrate this life experience and are told with a vocal that can provide grit in a Lucinda Williams style and a beauty and purity that belies her age, sometimes in the same song.
The opening title song sets out what will be the core of the instrumental players throughout the album, with Lee on acoustic, her producer,…
Emerging out of the Pacific Northwest in 2021 and later relocating to Joshua Tree, California, This Lonesome Paradise is as much a living, breathing product of its hallucinatory high-desert environment as its reverb-rattled noir-Americana is a direct reflection of it. With the new Death Motels, the quartet has taken the next step into the boundless cinematic landscape that’s been teased in its previous work.
…Musically, Death Motels is relentless. Ferocious guitars slash through the silence like blades, low-end bass churns like a storm beneath the earth, and Ray Béchard’s voice hovers somewhere between incantation and confession. Jordin Bordeaux’s spectral voice and Mellotron textures conjure an atmosphere that feels both…
The themes that weave through Mud Blood Bone, the fourth record from Canada’s Cat Clyde, tackle large, universal ideas. Yet, it’s her gift for writing deeply personal lyrics that gives the album both depth and a striking sense of intimacy. From the remarkable opener “Where Is My Love,” which explores longing and absence, to the strikingly beautiful “Night Eyes,” a song about breaking free from a toxic relationship, the record moves through familiar emotional territory while feeling as confessional as reading someone’s diary.
Mud Blood Bone finds Clyde at her most confident lyrically, while the music moves effortlessly between folk, Americana, and blues. Those blues elements are immediately apparent on the album opener, “Where Is My Love.” The song…
The Outfit present a career defining new album, Preservers of the Pearl, asserting themselves as messengers of the new wave of underground rock and roll, pushing the movement forward alongside fellow trailblazers Mystery Lights, Sheer Mag, Shadow Show, Uni Boys…
Everything has been leading here. Daniel Romano shifts from his position as sole writer, opening the floor to Outfit stalwarts Ian Romano and Carson McHone, and welcoming into the fold longtime friend and legendary Canadian rock-n-roller, Tommy Major. The band is functioning as a true collective – multiple voices and perspectives – all serving one creative pulse. The result is both a new beginning and a homecoming, a complete and fearless statement.
The Long Ryders were once the shit, to use the appropriate slang expression from back in the day. Their albums from the mid-1980s (Native Son, State of Our Union, Two-Fisted Tales) were part of the onslaught of New Wave Cowpunk bands such as Jason and the Scorchers, Green on Red, Rank and File, and the Beat Farmers, that generated excitement among college-age audiences who were turned off by mainstream country acts.
The band took a long hiatus, although they sporadically got together for brief reunions. They released a new studio album in 2019, 32 years after their previous effort. Bassist Tom Stevens died in 2021. The group released their fifth album in 2023 and have been semi-active performing live.
The Long Ryders’ latest record,…
Cody Diekhoff (aka Chicago Farmer) grew up in an Illinois farming community in the tiny community of Delevan, and his grandparents were a pivotal part of his upbringing, with his grandfather being a master storyteller as well as a first-class farmer. Young Cody listened to these stories with fascination, and the effect they had on him has stayed with him all his life. Diekhoff has now recorded his debut album with the help of his recent touring band, The Fieldnotes. They are Charlie Harris on bass, Cody Jensen on keyboards and mandolin, Frank Kurtz on drums and Jaik Willis on guitar.
Listening to these songs, there’s a raw immediacy to them with Diekhoff’s vocals being delivered as though it’s his last day on earth.
The expanded release includes two additional songs: A cover of the Jason Isbell track “Good While It Lasted” and “Stopover”.
Listening to current Nashville resident Imogen Clark’s latest, Choking On Fuel, you’d swear she was a native who got her start playing dive bars around town before finally getting booked at The Bluebird Café or The Basement East.
Surprisingly, Clark got her start as a teen playing bars in Sydney, Australia, not exactly the most obvious jumping off spot for a rising country/Americana star. Regardless, Choking On Fuel is an impressive collection.
Clark has spent the past few years on the road, headlining as well as opening for a slew of disparate musicians ranging from…
Charles “Poppy Bob” Walker’s guitar compositions have a liquid, expansive cosmic Americana scope. The notes linger in pellucid backwashes and slide eerily between the known tones. Not much is known about the Yuma-based outsider artist, now apparently deceased, but his work on DOUBLE-WIDE —and on the earlier Dirt Bike Vacation — is a far cry from the usual pickin’ and grinnin’ proficiencies of blues-folk old-timers.
The guitarist and song-hunter Cameron Knowler stumbled on Walker’s work at, of all places, a Texas local library branch. Intrigued enough to track down a sample, Knowler immediately became obsessed with the music, which evokes ambient kosmische players like Chuck Johnson, Luke Schneider, and in some moods, William Tyler.
There are several artists, it seems, who go by the name of Sam Lewis. So, just to be clear, this release, Everything’s Fine, is from the Nashville musician of that name, and it’s his 7th release, following on from 2024’s Superposition. In terms of intention, Lewis, in discussion with studio engineer Joe McMahan, wanted to deliver a sparse recording, in places that might be seen as the case, but there’s still a full sound across this album.
The spirit of John Prine floats above the opener and single ‘Chase the Moon’, rhyming couplets and a narrative melodic bounce push along picked and strummed guitar. The song was created around the time of Prine’s passing, so it’s fitting that his influence lives on through this.
…Title track ‘Everything’s Fine’ appears at…
Grammy Award-winning singer, songwriter, and guitarist Trey Hensley has officially released his solo studio album Can’t Outrun The Blues via Pinecastle Records. The 10-track collection marks a major milestone in Hensley’s solo career and features an impressive lineup of collaborators including Molly Tuttle, Vince Gill, Steve Wariner, and the legendary Nitty Gritty Dirt Band.
Produced by renowned hitmaker Brent Maher, known for his work with artists such as The Judds, Kenny Rogers, and Merle Haggard, Can’t Outrun The Blues showcases Hensley’s signature blend of fiery guitar playing and powerful vocals. The album seamlessly fuses Bluegrass, Americana, and traditional Country influences into a cohesive and energetic project that highlights both his…