Body Meat with Anysia Kim, and DORIS

Florist

with Allegra Krieger

and Small Sur

“It’s a portrait of who we are as collaborators, as really long term friends and as extended family as well,” leader Emily Sprague says of her band’s new self-titled album. Florist is also the strongest album of the band’s decade-long career, an immersive work that conveys the magic of the earth and of family, and the whole of the band’s heart. It arrives just after the cap of a winding journey. In 2017, shortly after the release of the band’s sophomore record, If Blue Could Be Happiness, Sprague sequestered herself in Los Angeles, thousands of miles away from friends and family, and from the physical void and spiritual crisis left in the wake of her mother’s death. There, she took up surfing and released Emily Alone, which was essentially a solo album released under the Florist moniker. Only after months of self reflection and therapy did Sprague realize that life in a silo is no way to live. That a life directed by fear is not much of a life. “The trauma response to losing my best friend, my mom, was to feel really afraid to get close to anybody ever again,” she says. “It’s sort of cheesy, but I realized that life is better when you share it. The answer isn’t to isolate yourself and be alone.”

Wishy

with Prize Horse

and Aunt Katrina

You could call Wishy’s story a lucky one. After prior monikers and iterations, Wishy was born as a kaleidoscope of alternative music’s semi-recent history, with traces of shoegaze, grunge and power-pop swirling together. On Triple Seven, Indiana songwriters Kevin Krauter and Nina Pitchkites’ musical synergy proves itself to be a rare one–the kind that sounds like someone striking gold. Part sly wink and part warm gratitude, it’s only fitting their much anticipated full length debut is titled Triple Seven.

By day Krauter works as a music teacher, giving drum and guitar lessons to students, while Pitchkites is a seamstress by trade and often makes embroidered merch for the band. Coming up in a scene defined by hardcore and emo, Krauter and Pitchkites instead found themselves writing melodies in their heads while driving to work, pulling music from the air and arriving at a blearier, more ethereal interpretation of Midwest expanse. Initially, their music oscillated between hazy dream-pop and heavier alt-rock.

The album is a loose web of vignettes and snapshots, capturing Krauter and Pitchkites in a whirlwind couple of years — exiting the pandemic, embarking on an embryonic project, making sense of their musical pasts while forging a musical future alongside one another, each of them on a journey of self-acceptance and self-understanding. Sometimes gorgeous, sometimes festering, and always cathartic, Triple Seven is a vibrant and exhilarating document of self-discovery with the scope and heft of the bygone big-budget rock albums that inspired it.

Horse Jumper of Love

with Spencer Radcliffe and Everything

and Primal Rat Screw

Horse Jumper of Love drift effortlessly between hazy slowcore and introspective folk on their easy-on-the-ears, hard-on-the-heart singles. Live, the Boston trio strum their way through a cathartic catalogue of love songs at a glacial pace.

Flowers For The Dead "Magnolia" Record Release with Prude & Eraser Girl

Trapped Under Ice

Gridiron

Firewalker

& Polarview

at Ottobar

all ages, 6pm

Been Stellar

Malice K

Scream from New York, NY, the first album by Been Stellar, is a remarkably brutal debut – bruised and volatile, it captures an image of ‘20s New York that’s unrelenting and harsh, where tenderness is a finite resource burned up by the machinery of the city and human connection is a luxury product. Leaving behind the driving shoegaze of their early recordings, the NYC-based five-piece tap into the disaffected sound and spirit of New York luminaries like Sonic Youth and Interpol, as well as the nihilistic, yearning cool of Iceage and Bends-era Radiohead, striking upon a sound that’s fearsome, buffeting and beautiful at the same time – a tidal wave as viewed from underneath.

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As its wry title implies, Scream from New York, NY, is a record about what happens when language fails – between friends, partners, a city and its citizens – and the primal scream you might let out when words just don’t work anymore. Guitarist Skyler Knapp, vocalist Sam Slocum, Brazilian-born guitarist Nando Dale, bass player Nico Brunstein and drummer Laila Wayans met as undergrads at NYU, bonding over a shared sense of humor and forming a motley crew based more on emotional compatibility than any rigid ideas of shared artistic sensibility. Finding that last vestiges of the city’s famed 2000s and 2010s DIY underground had been ground down to nothing, the band put on their own shows, renting spaces and collaborating with friends to build the world they wanted to inhabit.

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Determined to break new sonic ground, the band embarked on a relentless practice schedule, even renting scrappy studios on days off during tour. After befriending him at SXSW, the band tapped producer Dan Carey (black midi, Wet Leg) to help coalesce the disparate elements of their sound that had been percolating: forceful, driving physicality; pop classicism; gnarled beauty; and a rich emotional core. The resulting 10-song album announces Been Stellar as gimlet-eyed chroniclers of contemporary youth, staring through noise and confusion into the dark heart of modern life. These songs embody the spirit of a city that makes and breaks its inhabitants on a daily basis – an irony befitting the album’s tone: Been Stellar’s preternatural ability to capture the disconnection that haunts New York with photorealist detail might just be the thing that vaults them into its pantheon.

++ Show moved to Union Craft Brewing, all Ottobar tickets will be honored ++

Geordie Greep (black midi)

with Nnamdi

at Union Craft Brewing

Is The New Sound a tonic for these times? Let’s ask Geordie Greep. “Music can be so much more than learning to play the same as everybody else. It can be anything you want. With recording The New Sound, it was the first time I have had no one to answer to. Being in a band (black midi), we often have this ‘we can do everything’ feeling, but you are also kind of limited in that approach, and sometimes it's good to do something else, to let go of things.”

Geordie’s debut solo album boasts a brand of high quality, all-embracing alternative pop fun not heard in a very long time, walking the line between the ridiculous and brilliant with a teflon-coated aplomb.

How the record came about is a thing to marvel at. Over thirty session musicians were involved in its making, on two continents. Greep says, “Half of the tracks were done in Brazil, with local musicians pulled together at the last minute. They’d never heard anything I’d done before, they were just interested in the demos I’d made. The tracking was all done in one, maybe two days.” The spirit of Greep’s increasingly febrile and furtive soliloquies simultaneously calls to mind both Frank Zappa and Frank Sinatra, with a healthy dash of Scott Walker sprinkled throughout. 

Street life is all around The New Sound: the listener is thrown into a world of cafes, bars, rented rooms, cabarets and strange museums. Here we see our heroes carry out a series of naughty assignments, military cosplay or socio-economic triumphs. The lines between parody and sermon are often blurred. The urbane romantic fantasy of single ‘Holy Holy’ tells the story of an imaginary liaison in a nightclub, soundtracked by ’noughties indie chords and bravura Latin big band arrangements - including a three-piano attack.

Like the night sky itself, the world of My Light, My Destroyer is always expanding. Cassandra Jenkins' third full-length cracks open the promise of reaching the edge of the new, with a wider sonic palette than ever before — encompassing guitar-driven indie rock, new age, sophistipop, and jazz. At the center of it all is Jenkins' curiosity towards the quarks and quasars that make up her universe, as she blends field recordings with poetic lyricism that is at turns allusive, humorous, devastating and confessional — an alchemical gesture that further deepens the richness of My Light, My Destroyer's 13 songs.

Jenkins suffuses My Light, My Destroyer with an easy confidence, which betrays the simple truth that the road here was not without difficulty. Referring to the 2021 breakout An Overview on Phenomenal Nature as her "intended swan song," she explains that she was prepared to hang it up when it came to touring and releasing her own music. "I was channeling what I knew in that moment — feeling lost," Jenkins recalls. "When that record came out, and people started to respond to what I had written, my plans to quit were foiled in the most unexpected, heartening, and generous way. Ready or not, it reinvigorated me."

Immediately upon finishing two years of touring An Overview, Jenkins approached recording a follow-up, only to find that capturing the creative spark while "running on fumes" was tough. "I was coming from a place of burn out and depletion, and in the months following the session, I struggled to accept that I didn't like the record I had just made. It felt uninspired," she confesses, "so I started over." With her closest musical co-conspirators reassembled, and producer, engineer, and mixer Andrew Lappin (L'Rain, Slauson Malone 1) behind the board, Jenkins set the prior sessions aside and began constructing My Light, My Destroyer from its ashes: "When we listened back in the control room that first day, I could see a space on my record shelf start to open up, because the songs were finding their home in real time. That spark informed the blueprint for the rest of the album, and its completion was propelled by a newfound momentum."