Following the two-person effort Could Have Done Anything (2023), Charlotte Cornfield‘s sixth album, Hurts Like Hell, is a much more collaborative outing as well as her first for Merge and her first since becoming a mother. Not coincidentally (and despite its title), it’s a warm, touching set of songs that is still packed with her often profoundly intimate observations, but this time there’s a subtle shift toward gratitude and perseverance. The collaborators include producer Phil Weinrobe (Adrianne Lenker, Lonnie Holley) and a backing band consisting of Palehound’s El Kempner (guitar, vocals), Lake Street Dive’s Bridget Kearney (bass, vocals), and Wilder Maker’s Adam Brisbin (guitar, pedal steel) and Sean Mullins (drums). The album was recorded at Weinrobe’s…
Tag Archive: Merge Records
Following a three-year studio hiatus and the arrest of their now-former drummer Joe Seiders on child pornography charges, Canadian indie rock supergroup The New Pornographers are returning with their new LP The Former Site Of.
Many musicians have come and gone from the New Pornographers over the past 30 years, but the core lineup of Neko Case, John Collins, Carl Newman, Todd Fancey, and Kathryn Calder remains. They were joined on the album by session drummer Charley Drayton, though Josh Wells will be behind the kit when they tour.
According to a press release, The Former Site Of features “ten short stories of people at personal and societal extreme.” In a November 2025 exclusive interview with Rolling Stone…
Crooked Fingers was the solo project of singer/guitarist Eric Bachmann. In the wake of the 1998 dissolution of his much-beloved previous band Archers of Loaf, Bachmann founded Crooked Fingers in early 2000.
One afternoon, Eric Bachmann’s son returned home from school with a sheath of pictures he’d drawn, all of them macabre. “There were crows and sinister figures with scythes and tombstones,” he recalls, “and in the center, there was a strange, lush green tree growing out of all of this red and black. On one of them, he had written ‘Deth, Swet Deth,’ and everything clicked in my head.”
Swet Deth, Bachmann’s first album under his Crooked Fingers moniker after a 15-year hiatus, organized itself around the image: its songs…
Carson McHone begins 2025’s Pentimento with the sounds of birds chirping outside and McHone reciting the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson, as they appeared in a letter to Margaret Fuller. Neither of these things necessarily define McHone’s creative approach on Pentimento, but their presence speaks volumes about how this LP differs from her previous work. There’s a musical and lyrical intimacy in these songs and performances that sounds natural and unforced, and she is clearly not wary of letting her poetic sensibilities take the lead in her writing. According to McHone, nearly all the songs on Pentimento began as poems before she struck on the idea of setting them to music, and while the words mesh comfortably with the melodies, much of this album…
…Friendship’s fourth album finds the Philadelphia band ascending to greatness, arriving at the place they’ve spent the past decade going. It’s one of the most assured indie rock albums in recent memory, the sound of a brilliant writer coming into his own and a band honing in on the ideal aesthetic complement for his songs, imbuing his quiet indignities with a plaintive grace.
Dan Wriggins sings in coarse baritone barks and bellows that evoke bards of desolation like David Berman and Jason Molina, sketching out moments from a humble life marked by loneliness and daily struggle, but not without a sense of humor. Those are trendy influences here at the peak of Lendermania, but Friendship are not bandwagon jumpers. As two of the main figures…