Indie Exclusive Releases

“I was born in the North Carolina mud,” says Jamil Rashad, better known as Boulevards, one of the most idiosyncratic artists making music in the Tarheel State. His fourth album, Electric Cowboy: Born in Carolina Mud, is caked in the soil where he grew up, mired in the muck of this place—not stuck but freed. Grounded in personal experience and haunted by personal demons, Electric Cowboy is an album that reaches out, that embraces the world, that mixes the confessional and the communal. But the dominant sound—the dominant mindset—is funk: gritty, warm, weird, charismatic. Rashad once again composed and recorded with Blake Rhein, guitarist for Durand Jones & the Indications, after they had worked so well together on 2020’s Brother! EP. They corralled an all-star team that included Adrian Quesada from the Grammy-nominated neo-soul act Black Pumas and Colin Croom from the Chicago indie-rock outfit Twin Peaks.

“On Electric Cowboy I wanted to make some modern funk that the kids would enjoy, but still have some soul elements and some punk elements. On the cover you see a black man on a horse running away from his demons. That’s me. You can hear it all in the songs – struggling with demons and still coming out on top of it all. That’s what funk is! You got some heavy, dark shit, but you also got some joyful compositions, funky basslines, dope harmonies, infectious hooks. So that’s me on the cover, the Electric Cowboy, slaying anything that comes in my path. I gotta keep riding, keep trucking, keep fighting, keep pushing.”

The Mercury Prize-winning, multiple GRAMMY- and BRIT Award-nominated band alt-J have announced their eagerly-awaited fourth album The Dream, set for release February 11, 2022. The Dream is an album of intrigue, beauty and humanity - a coalescence of everything that has made alt-J a global band with true staying power. True-crime inspired stories and tales of Hollywood and the Chateau Marmont rub shoulders with some of the band’s most personal moments to-date The album was created after a period of rest for the band following their seismic world tour in support of previous record RELAXER. It is a record that is the sound of a band growing as songwriters and storytellers.

It’s been a decade since SLASH FEATURING MYLES KENNEDY AND THE CONSPIRATORS released their debut album together, and since then have been on one of the more impressive and unrelenting tears in rock ‘n’ roll, issuing two more hard-hitting, highly acclaimed records, and rocking stages all over the world. Enter 4, the Dave Cobb-produced highly anticipated studio effort from SMKC. True to the band’s expanding legacy, it’s everything you’ve come to expect from SLASH, MYLES KENNEDY, TODD KERNS (bass), BRENT FITZ (drums) and FRANK SIDORIS (rhythm guitar)… but also unlike anything you’ve heard from them yet. This time out, SLASH says, they captured a certain “magic” – the sound of five musicians and band mates listening to and playing off one another in the spirit of live, in-the-moment collaboration. “It has a very spontaneous, fun kind of thing to it, and I love that,” SLASH says of 4. “It’s the sound of the five of us just jamming together in one room.”

A fever dream in sonic form, The Alien Coast is the first album St. Paul & The Broken Bones recorded in their hometown of Birmingham. Produced by Matt Ross-Spang (Drive-By Truckers, Margo Price) - the bands fourth full-length is a dizzying convergence of rock & roll and R&B, psychedelia and stoner metal, gospel and jazz-funk. At turns explosive, elegant, and thrillingly unhinged - it makes for a majestic backdrop to the groups visceral exploration of the strangest dimensions of the human psyche.

Bad Suns sound - dreamy '80s pastiche flanked by Stratocasters through cranked Vox amps, pulsing synths, and palpable rhythmic energy - that endeared listeners to the band in the first place, and their fourth LP, APOCALYPSE WHENEVER, uses that musical foundation as the jumping-off point for their next evolution. Conceived as "the soundtrack to a movie that doesn't yet exist," the 13-track album, helmed by longtime producer Eric Palmquist (MUTEMATH, Thrice) at his Palmquist Studios and the band's North Hollywood rehearsal spot, is more conceptually rigorous than anything they've ever attempted - but no less compelling or accessible. "We also knew we wanted the album to have a through-line, a story from beginning to end," frontman Christo Bowman explains, so the band did what any good directors would: They assembled a mood board, filtering their neo-noir version of Los Angeles through the dreamlike haziness of author Haruki Murakami, the futuristic flair of Terminator 2: Judgment Day and Blade Runner, and the lifted cinematography of Spike Jonze's HER. These disparate influences don't just offer APOCALYPSE WHENEVER an expanded palette of sonic choices to color Bad Sun's airtight hooks - they help give the songs an emotional complexity that works on a multitude of levels depending on how listeners choose to receive them.

Swan Song is the 5 th  studio album from Ohio based metalcore act The Plot In You. It is the follow up to the four piece’s 2018 Fearless Records debut Dispose and will be released on September 17.

Noah Gundersen returns with his much anticipated new album, ‘A Pillar of Salt’ out October 8th ahead of a US headline tour kicking off October 9th. The project is a return to form for Gundersen, coupling heartfelt lyrics with his signature understated vocal performance. Featuring singles “Sleepless in Seattle” and “Atlantis,” a stunning duet with Phoebe Bridgers, fans old and new will be celebrating this triumphant piece of art.

Eric D. Johnson, the creative force behind Fruit Bats, doesn't spend a lot of time looking in the rearview mirror. But with the 20th anniversary of his first Fruit Bats release (2001's Echolocation) on his mind, it seemed as good a time as any to take stock of his work-and he's doing so in the form of Sometimes a Cloud Is Just a Cloud: Slow Growers, Sleeper Hits and Lost Songs (2001-2021), a two-disc collection that tracks the history of Fruit Bats from it's earliest days to right now. Thoughtfully compiled by Johnson himself, this set is split in two distinct halves. Set in reverse chronological order, the first disc cherry-picks from Fruit Bats' official releases, including fan favorites-"Humbug Mountain Song" from 2016's Absolute Loser and "The Bottom of It" from his 2019 Merge debut Gold Past Life-alongside some of Johnson's more personal choices like "Glass in Your Feet" from Echolocation.

Band of Horses’ sixth album and first record in more than five years.  Sonically, the album is a return to their earlier work and the kind of raw ethos that lies at the heart of Band of Horses. Emotionally intense, both on a personal and elemental level, on Things Are Great we find band founder Ben Bridwell more autobiographical than he’s ever been on record detailing the nebulous frustrations and quiet indignities of relationship changes and what a person will do to make things right.

Archive Material is the Dublin band’s second album and first for London label Full Time Hobby. Silverbacks recorded the album during the summer of 2020 with producer Dan Fox (Girl Band) and brings together the members’ influences elegantly. Fans of Television, Wire, Devo, and Parquet Courts will feel at home with Archive Material. Available on CD and limited edition, blue vinyl.

A series of inspired encounters between creative forces from various worlds of sound and vision has resulted in “Hunter’s Moon,” the infectious first new track from GHOST in 2 years accompanied by phantasmagoric video directed by Amanda Demme, and featured in the newest installment of the blockbuster horror film franchise, Halloween Kills.

Single sleeve jacket with spine, standard gloss finish, white paper inner sleeve, standard weight, vinyl with small hole, and John Carpenter “Halloween Kills (Main Title)” b-side.

For two decades now, Greensky Bluegrass has been building an empire, brick by brick. Their eighth studio release, Stress Dreams was produced by Dominic Davis (Jack White) and Grammy winning engineer/producer Glenn Brown amidst the 2020 pandemic. It follows their 2019 release, All for Money, which landed on the Top 100 at the Billboard Albums Chart, Top 20 at Independent Albums and Current Country Albums, Top 10 at Americana/Folk Albums Top 5 at Heatseekers, and #1 at Bluegrass Albums. Greensky is widely known for their dazzling live performances and relentless touring schedule. As with traditional bluegrass, the band writes about their own contemporary day-to-day happenings, emotions, and experiences in the modern world. Their die-hard fans pack out venues across the country. They travel in droves and sell out multiple-night show runs at iconic venues like Red Rocks and The Ryman.  

Elvis Costello & The Imposters release The Boy Named If, an album of urgent, immediate songs with bright melodies, stinging guitar solos, and a quick step to the rhythm. Costello says, “The full title of this record is ‘The Boy Named If (And Other Children’s Stories).’ ‘IF’ is a nickname for your imaginary friend; your secret self, the one who knows everything you deny, the one you blame for the shattered crockery and the hearts you break, even your own.” Produced by Costello and Sebatian Krys.

The highly anticipated fourth album by GRAMMY-nominated band The Lumineers.

Bonobo will release new album Fragments, due on January 14, 2022 via Ninja Tune. Fragments is the most emotionally intense record that he - aka Simon Green - has ever had to make. It’s no surprise that it’s also his masterpiece. The album features Jamila Woods, Joji, Kadhja Bonet, Jordan Rakei, O’Flynn and Miguel Atwood-Ferguson. Born first out of fragments of ideas and experimentation, the album ultimately was fused together in a burst of creativity fueled by both collaboration and Green’s escape into the wild.

Underoath return to their unique chaotic core with their seventh studio album, Voyeurist. An unguarded keyhole invites the viewer to peer into the process, and draw their own conclusion on who the band is, and what that perception reveals about the viewer themselves. Amidst the colliding perspectives, it’s clear that identities have been lost, and you are no longer you.

STARSET return with their 4th studio album, HORIZONS. A continued voyage through a captivating science fiction narrative, HORIZONS delivers a cinematic soundscape that accompanies the listener through pain, love, descent, and triumph. The world has been consumed by synthetic methods of escaping reality, and it is with this technology that we are able to explore life through other users' experiences — finally, the ability to be someone else.

Cat Power returns with Covers, Chan Marshall’s third album of her celebrated reinterpretations of songs by classic and contemporary artists.

On Covers, Marshall reaches back to songs that have affected her from childhood to the present, connecting each with a deeply personal memory. She recalls her grandmother’s love for Billie Holiday’s “I’ll Be Seeing You” and finding a box of cassettes as a teenager that led her to discovering Kitty Wells’ “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels.” She remembers getting chills hearing Iggy Pop’s “Endless Sea” in the 1986 Michael Hutchence film Dogs in Space and being a broke artist in her twenties in New York City spending her last dollar to play the Replacements’ “Here Comes a Regular” on the jukebox at Mona’s. She recorded the Pogues’ “Pair of Brown Eyes,” which she calls one of her favorite songs of all time, after it reminded her of one friend who passed from cancer and turned to Bob Seger’s “Against the Wind” to help her heal from the loss of another. 

Alongside covers of rock-and-roll icons from Nico to Nick Cave, Marshall brings her inimitable vocal power and elegant arrangements to songs by contemporary artists, capturing the defiance of Dead Man’s Bones’ “Pa Pa Power” and the dreaminess of Lana Del Rey’s “A White Mustang.” And the album opens with a dazzling cover of Frank Ocean’s “Bad Religion,” of which she says, “I believe in whatever God is called… But I think that the wretched men that have come in history to implement horror on humanity in the name of these religions is something that should be looked at universally.” 

Finally, Covers finds Marshall, an artist of constant evolution, reworking “Hate,” a song from her 2006 LP The Greatest on which she sang “I hate myself and I want to die.” Marshall says she has always felt “antsy” about the track and reimagined it as “Unhate,” a new version that looks back on the raw devastation of the original track in the rearview. “We all have bad days,” she says. “We all have shit, trauma, something. There are times when you feel like that. But I needed to make it right.” 

Marshall self-produced all of Covers; it was recorded in Los Angeles at Mant Studios with Rob Schnapf, who mixed and engineered. 

In December of 2020, The Wild Feathers hauled off to a pre-civil war built cabin in VanLeer, TN where the ideas and songs from Alvarado met for the very first time. In the past, the band typically liked to collect all the tunes they’ve written over the past year, brainstorm, conceptualize, and rehearse isolated in a cabin before heading into the studio. This time for their 4th studio album, they decided to bring the studio to the cabin. The guys spent a week jamming and creating while having the ability to capture the performances while they were fresh. Produced by the band, Alvarado is the truest representation of The Wild Feathers to date. No outside musicians, no outside opinions, just us playing our new songs in a room with the best mics they could find.

Seether - "Vicennial - 2 Decades Of Seether" Vicennial - 2 Decades of Seether is a career-spanning compilation of the RIAA Platinum-selling group's greatest hits, including 16 #1 original singles, as well as the fan-favorite cover of "Careless Whisper." The track list, curated by the band, takes you through their impactful 20-year career - from their early breakthrough singles "Broken" and "Fine Again" to their recent radio success "Dangerous." Indie Exclusive Smoke 2 LP w/ Gatefold Jacket.

Special edition of the album includes 6 photographs from the Barn sessions.

BARN, the new Neil Young/Crazy Horse album was recorded in a remote, restored, 19th century log barn. This musical family has played together for a half century, yet they continue creating new music. Neil and the Horse fans have long shouted for “more barn” and here it is… 10 new songs that capture the wild, rock and roll spirit, the idiosyncratic raw sound and the lyrical beauty that epitomizes a classic NYCH collaboration. The last song appeared on the last morning and was recorded just an hour later during a pounding hailstorm and during the full moon.

The album was recorded this summer over a handful of days. The ten new songs encompass all that Neil Young with Crazy Horse are known for, beautiful romantic acoustic ballads, powerhouse electric rockers and insightful rollicking tunes that stick with you. 

Niko Bolas was parked adjacent to the barn, in an exquisite analog mobile recording truck, Le Mobile ready to capture and mix the album on the spot. Produced by The Volume Dealers – Neil Young and Niko Bolas, the album will be released on vinyl, CD, cassette and digitally. There will also be a deluxe edition that will include the LP, CD. and Blu-ray film.Special edition of the album includes 6 photographs from the Barn sessions.

Distant Populations, just the fourth full-length album of Quicksand’s career, comes as a comparatively swift follow-up to Interiors--which itself came a full 22 years after its predecessor, 1995’s Manic Compression. Critically lauded and deemed very much worth the wait, Interiors succeeded in reestablishing the band as the powerful and contemporary entity they had always been.

Distant Populations has a punchier, more up-tempo sound than its predecessor; its 11 songs are concise, carved sonic jewels boasting not a single wasted note; and its raw power, its gripping lyricism, leaps out from the very first listening. It is a striking step up for the band.

The songwriting itself had been no minor process: Following the release of Interiors, the band successfully toured around the world and in the process fully re-established their chemistry together. Looking forward to making the next album, the three of them—frontman/ guitarist Walter Schreifels, bassist Sergio Vega, and drummer Alan Cage—had methodically recorded various soundchecks, improvisations, and show rehearsals, and compiled the results. “Eventually, when it came time to make a record,” Schreifels says, “we would just edit down to the ones that were most exciting to us all, and then refocus on them and see if we could recapture the magic from it.” 

There may be a final irony in the title of Distant Populations. Practically speaking, that’s precisely whom Quicksand recorded it for: Listeners very far away. Not a single one of these songs has ever been played live onstage. The band has dates on hold for the fall, notes Schreifels, and fingers are crossed Quicksand will be out there performing very soon. They will likely be the most memorable shows of the band’s career. 

Pluperfect Mind, the NNA Tapes debut from the 23-year-old UK-based musician Dear Laika (a.k.a. Isabelle “Izzy” Thorn), is an extraordinary creation — a beautiful and unique oddity which exists in the liminal space between dreamworlds and a blurry, watercolored version of reality. It is a reflection on the past few years of Izzy’s life, during which she sought solitude in the North Wessex Downs while beginning her gender transition. The album is a beguiling collection of vivid lyrics and celestial song, bound together with digital glitch and field recordings of flora and fauna. Comparisons can be made to Björk, Tim Hecker or Bat For Lashes, but ultimately, Dear Laika’s exploration of the experimental and the mystical builds something intricate and intimate that is truly original and bewitching.

“Devolution Series #2 - Galactic Quarantine” was recorded between July and September 2020 in various places around the world. Originally streamed on September 5th, 2020 on StageIt.com as a replacement show for the COVID affected “Empath Vol 2 European Tour” and various cancelled Summer festivals. The show features Devin on vocals and guitars, Samus Paulicelli III on drums, Wes Hauch on guitars and Diego Tejeida on keys.

Billy Bragg will be releasing a pandemic blues LP on 10/8 via Cooking Vinyl. This is his 10th studio album. The Million Things That Never Happened was produced by Romeo Stodart and Dave Izumi at Echo Zoo studio in Eastbourne, England. Bragg wrote the entire album solo, aside from “Ten Mysterious Photos That Can’t Be Explained,” which he co-wrote with his son Jack Valero.

Simply calling Curtis Harding a soul man feels reductive. Harding's voice conveys pain, pleasure, longing, tenderness, sadness and strength-a full gamut of emotions. Today his voice takes on an optimistic lilt with his his new album, If Words Were Flowers. If Words Were Flowers is Harding's first new music since 2018, a follow up to his critically acclaimed 'Face Your Fears" album. It features songs like " Hopeful", where Harding croons with devotion over a classic soul groove, textured with infectious horn playing, background singers and modern psychedelic flourishes. Harding fuels his psychedelic sound with the essence of Soul but isn't bound by it. Instead, his songs convey an eclectic blend of genres leaping from the many musical lives he has lived from following his evangelical Gospel-singing mother on tour around the country as a child to rapping in Atlanta, forming a garage band with The Black Lips' Cole Alexander to singing back-up for Cee Lo Green. Through these experiences he fully embraces life's darkest intricacies and conjures dynamic, addictive melodies

The Muslims formed in 2017, brought together by the aftermath of the 2016 election. They have since released three albums The Muslims (2018), Mayo Supreme (2019), Gentrified Chicken (2020), and one EP Inshallah: Tomorrow We Inherit the Earth (2020). The all-queer, black & brown Muslim punk band unapologetically use music as a vessel to call out racism, the American political landscape, and white supremacy. The Muslims have a lot to say and they aren't afraid of hurting any feelings in the process.

The band's upcoming album, F*** These F***in Fascists, is the ultimate sing-along anthem against all forms of oppression. It's the perfect balance of humor, tenderness and political rage, wrapped in affirmations for oppressed peoples. Musically, the band continues to bring dynamic melodies to the foundation of classic punk riffs, sprinkled with out-of-this-world rhythmic outbursts. F*** These F***in Fascists is easily the punk album of the decade that will definitely make your grandparents cry. The Muslims are QADR (vocals/guitar), Abu Shea (bass), and Ba7Ba7 (drums).

Sometimes, the best place to begin is at the end. If you really want to dig deep into Illusory Walls, the fourth album by THE WORLD IS A BEAUTIFUL PLACE & I AM NO LONGER AFRAID TO DIE, it definitely helps to do that. That’s because epic closer “Fewer Afraid”—all 19 minutes, 44 seconds of it—doesn’t just revisit the themes and ideas on the ten songs that precede it, but also offers a self-aware summary of the Connecticut band’s entire history. It’s the conclusion of all the stories within the record as well as a nod to all the lives that helped make them—little glimpses of everything that’s come before, on both a micro, immediate level, and a more universal one. “That song is a higher level look at my whole life and the whole world,” explains vocalist/guitarist David F.
Bello, “as well as the album, our band and our discography. It places the band in the context of the rest of the world, as if we’re listening to everything that came before. It touches on all the themes of the previous songs, but there are also callbacks to songs
from earlier in our career. But in this song, they’re the object, not the subject—I’m talking about a world in which these things happen, not talking about these things happening.”

Due to the coronavirus pandemic, the band—completed by Steven K. Buttery (drums and percussion), Joshua Cyr (bass/vocals) and Katie Dvorak (vocals/synth)—had nothing but time to realize the full extent of their musical and thematic aspirations. And so, four years on from lauded third album Always Foreign, they were able to make what is undoubtedly the band’s most ambitious and epic record to date. Written and recorded remotely—a first for the band—Illusory Walls takes on the weight of human existence while it’s buckling under the pressure of today’s near-dystopian society. Personal anxieties and political struggles collide with a series of portentous, apocalyptic and dramatic tunes, resulting in some of the darkest music the band has made since forming in 2009.