“If I just get on my bike, I’ll outride any heartache,” sings Ella Williams on “Surfing USA,” a yawning, lovelorn paean to heartbreak in the Great Lakes. Since making her label debut as Squirrel Flower in 2020, Williams has translated her rich emotional life into a catalog of smoky indie rock and folk that careens between whispered intimacy and cathartic sprawl. She’s a Boston native who found her voice in the Midwest, beginning her career in Iowa, then adopting Chicago as her hometown and frequent muse. Say a Prayer to the Gods of Getting Going is her fourth album for Illinois indie Polyvinyl, and finds her in a similar sonic space to Tomorrow’s Fire, the 2023 album she made with co-producer Alex Farrar. This time around, she and a group of Chicago collaborators cut a live,…
Tag Archive: Polyvinyl
Sometimes a solo project and sometimes a band, Jilian Medford’s IAN SWEET has switched up its sound from album to album, sometimes favoring bright guitar pop, sometimes shimmery, synth-aided noise pop, and other times applying heavier guitar tones and dissonance to the songwriter’s personal, melodic songs. With IAN SWEET’s fifth album, Shiverstruck, she delivers her most direct-sounding material yet, which is to say that she sticks with mostly full-band arrangements of amplified indie and synthy pop, but makes room for balladry, the occasional appearance of instruments like strings and piano, and a more vulnerable sensibility. The occasion is a breakup album that also carries the weight of a relocation from N.Y.C. to her hometown of L.A. and…
As any of Montreal devotée knows, Kevin Barnes has long been known to make diaristic and compelling hay out of chronicling the unfiltered nuances of his personal life. As the long-running musical project enters its 30th year of existence, Barnes has remained true to form, continuing to evolve while navigating the murkiest waters life has to offer.
Emerging out of great personal upheaval in Barnes’s life, aethermead, of Montreal’s 20th album, recalls the beauty-in-the-breakdown immediacy of Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer? mixed with the garage-y jangle of Lousy With Sylvanbriar and Cherry Peel’s homespun intimacy-but, remember, the last band that you’ll ever hear truly repeat themselves is of Montreal.
…includes two previously unreleased songs “Leave Overjoyed” and “Something Drive”.
Arriving ten years after the fun-loving indie rockers released their debut EP in 2015, the self-produced IRON is Post Animal‘s fourth studio album and their first to feature Joe Keery — aka Stranger Things’ Steve Harrington — since their 2018 full-length debut. IRON also saw all six of them gathering in person in the studio after operating remotely for a few years, with several other members besides Keery having relocated away from their base of Chicago. These reunions seem significant on an album that is not only named for the friends’ connection but proves to be their most sentimental release yet, with topics like friendship, loss, and aging surfacing on many of…
Before the phrase Adventure Club became the title of Laura Jane Grace’s electrifying and affirming new album, it was the name for her gaggle of adventurous friends in Greece. In the summer of 2024, Grace joined an artist residency program in Athens, embedding with Greek punk rockers there while she wrote songs about the sordid trials of her life and world-sobriety, autocracy, identity. By night, this new pickup band, including Grace’s wife and collaborator, Paris Campbell Grace, would often play and record. But by day, they’d explore the ancient and beautiful landscape and the city’s vibrant culture. They dove from beaches nestled in seaside caves into the Aegean and swam with sea turtles. They submitted to tourism, seeing the Parthenon and Epidaurus and breaking…