“Caught someplace between Jerry Reed and Gram Parsons, Famous Lunch is a world ridden hard, put away wet and full of fragility, boundless, unpredictable love and one-liners that’ll make you cry, laugh and puke—in that order.” — Paste
“Acker’s dual strengths are his songs’ easy, approachable pacing and his everyday poetic one-liners. To the former, his jangly, acoustic-driven tunes are as comfortable as well-worn jeans that have never seen a spin cycle. To the latter, lines…build vivid scenes at an impressively low word count.” — No Depression
"As we wrote and recorded the album, baseball imagery and themes naturally found their way into the songs, so Scott suggested 'The Baseball Diaries,' and really encouraged me to lean into it. I like that it subtly evokes 'The Basketball Diaries' in the same way Liz Phair's 'Exile in Guyville' nodded to 'Exile on Main St.'—not as a direct imitation, but as a reference point that helps frame a deeply personal body of work.
“Britain's most incisive songwriter." – THE GUARDIAN
”The thinking person's indie pop legend, and unaccredited national treasure.” – STEWART LEE (THE SUNDAY TIMES)
“The former Hefner frontman follows a set of Oulipian constraints to produce a set of typically affecting meditations of love, life and mortality.” – THE QUIETUS
"Darren Hayman has always been something of a niche and cult figure, but music as good and as important as this should be heard by far more than a cult audience.” –DIY
“Musically, it’s melodic electropop willfully reluctant to be tied to any reference points. Maybe Marianne Faithfull’s ‘Ballad Of Lucy Jordan’, for its quietly bubbling synths and domestic angst? Or a more humane Momus?” – ELECTRONIC SOUND
Julia Holter has never been content to leave a song alone. Across a career spent blurring the boundaries between experimental composition and pop, she has built elaborate musical worlds, then found ways to unsettle them. On Materia, that impulse turns inward: old ideas are revisited, familiar structures loosen, and music becomes something fluid, open to revision.
On this episode of If It Be Your Will, Holter traces the path from her early experiments and studies in composition to the increasingly expansive, emotionally intricate records that followed. We talk about orchestration as a way of thinking, the strange relationship between control and intuition, and what changes when you stop treating a composition as a finished thing.
A companion to Something in the Room She Moves, Materia finds Holter continuing to question how music takes shape — and what might emerge when you return to it with fresh ears. Our conversation moves through creative uncertainty, the long life of an idea, and the possibilities that appear when you let a piece become something you didn't originally imagine.
Sometimes the most revealing way forward is to take things apart.
What if the things that scare you are also the things you need to move through?
On this episode of If It Be Your Will, SHEAL — the musical project of Toronto-based songwriter Sheilagh McNab — talks about stage anxiety, trusting her instincts, and learning to make room for both solitude and connection. We trace the path from Courage Again to golden hours and the new home-going chapter, exploring how motherhood, memory, and the quieter moments of everyday life find their way into her songs. It’s a conversation about letting go of old expectations, finding your footing, and figuring out what it means to feel at home in your own life.
The light, rich, dreamy world throughout the video is sharply contrasted by scenes of solitude and darkness, suffocated by her own desire. Fayes adds, "I think this concept highlights the emotional center of the song, unfulfilled longing."
The concept of home haunts This Is the Kit’s tender, thoughtful seventh studio album, Ghost Coat. “I was interested in exploring our relationship with home,” says frontwoman Kate Stables. “Where home is, or was, where we come from, where we’re going. Sometimes it’s just where you put your bag down, especially for someone who travels a lot. Maybe it’s less to do with a place, and more who you’re with – people that make you feel like you’re at home.”
“You Move is about savoring the unexpected fruits that reveal themselves amid times of uprootedness. It is a song about putting trust in the glimmer of new love, and carefully sowing the seeds for it to sustain. Both thematically and sonically, it’s about searching, surrendering and allowing yourself to relish. My hope is that “You Move” invites people into the world of my soon-to-be-finished sophomore album – a world that encompasses a full-swing of emotionality, and lets loss and pleasure dance together. I’m so excited to share the song and video ahead of my first-ever UK/EU shows.” – Avery Friedman (she/her)
“Scarily accomplished…Inhabits a complex emotional realm where nervousness can coexist with (and inform) ideas of sexiness, sadness, tenderness.” – KLOF MAG
“Her full-length debut, New Thing, is a work of raw singer/songwriter confessionalism, evoking the knotted melodies, homespun arrangements, and searing edges of musicians like Squirrel Flower, Babehoven, or Adrienne Lenker.“ – UNDER THE RADAR MAGAZINE
“Plenty of stakes present themselves in debut efforts, but Friedman stands before audiences fearless – 5/5.” – NEW NOISE MAGAZINE
“There's a particular way light particles interact that Montreal-based folk singer-songwriter Edwin Raphael captures in his thoughtfully expansive, globe-trotting soundscapes. "Mosaic in the Sun" and "A Sunbeam Lent to Us Briefly," arrive with the breathless wonder of language's inability to articulate the emotional heft of a momentary prism falling upon the scene just so.” - Exclaim!, Most Anticipated Albums of 2026
“...it’s indie folk with enough orchestral weight to fill a room. These are songs built for distance and open windows.” - Montreal Rocks
“Buzzing drones meet uplifting guitar melodies as Edwin Raphael’s imaginative narrative unravels on First Time on Earth. The ebbs and flows from bursts of energy to pulled-back introspective moments. Life brings with it more questions than answers, but it’s seeking beauty in the mundane, in the wonder of small miracles, that we find meaning." CBC Music, 'Songs You Need To Hear’
Montreal-based, Newfoundland-raised musician Aaron Powell’s new album Hollowbody, his seventh album as Fog Lake, represents a step up in Powell’s songwriting acumen, with its ten songs weaving travelogue-style lyricism, diaristic accounts of people and characters and a handle on pop songwriting that feels both new and distinctly Fog Lake. The album was co-produced, mixed and mastered by longtime collaborator Warren Hildebrand of Foxes in Fiction who helped push the record to an even more refined and crystalline sonic territory. Instagram
THAO returns with Show Me, her first album in six years, and it’s a record about what happens when you stop trying to keep parts of yourself at a safe distance. We talk about divorce, desire, queer identity, family, Vietnam, community, and the uncomfortable work of changing how you move through the world. We also get into collaboration, the many forms her storytelling has taken, and the difference between telling your story and actually letting someone see you. This is a thoughtful, funny, deeply human conversation with an artist still willing to question herself.
Will Schwartz spent more than a decade writing fiction before The Male Patternbrought him back to music. On If It Be Your Will, we talk about I Was Shot in the Heart! — a darkly funny, deeply human concept album about a bitter suburban dad who sees himself as the hero of his own tragedy. Will talks about growing up with music and writing, fatherhood, rediscovering the joy of making things simply because you want to, and why hiding behind a fictional character can sometimes reveal more truth than writing about yourself.
"I am absolutely head over heels in love with this record. It absolutely made my day. The lyrics, the narrative structure: it’s some Randy Newman-level shit. Just brilliant stuff all around." - Chris Ingalls (PopMatters)
“The Male Pattern (aka Will Schwartz) explores the darker side of straight white male consciousness in his upcoming concept album I Was Shot in the Heart! (out September 25.) Schwartz's ice-cold character sketch on "I'm a Solider" exposes the self-pitying paranoia behind the conservative mind, all while skewering country music tropes.” – Rainbow Rodeo
"We’re not certain a satirical concept album described as “Springsteen meets Ween” was on our bingo card of releases in 2026, but sometimes you only realise you’ve been waiting for something when it finally arrives...The undeniable irony and playfulness do nothing to undermine the heartbreaking loneliness running through its heart. An anthem of America in 2026, where vapidity, ridiculousness and mean-spirited self-interest feel like symptoms of some dark, cursed pathology lurking beneath the surface."
It's been a crazy journey, as always, to get new music recorded and out into the world, and this release definitely came with a mountain of challenges, both in my personal life and music world. It's incredible to always land on the same important phrase: "so long as the music is the best it can be, that's all that matters". Which is what all my music friends and friends outside of my work team and family always tell me. And let me tell you. I couldn't have created anything more honest than the music I've made over the last few years.
A bit about the song
Hear Me Out - the title in itself already tells you a lot about the song. Lyrically, it talks about wanting to be seen and heard by a loved one. Not only because we should all be heard in a relationship (of any kind), but because it can save the relationship. Hear Me Out sonically travels through more stripped-back moments, at the start of the song, then builds into a whirlwind wind of emotion and chaos. Ending in calm intimacy. This is a song for those who deserve to be heard.
Julia Holter always knew there were multiple forms her song “Materia” could take. The tune’s dynamic, Hildegard von Bingen-inspired melody and dense modal chords stood on their own without a complex arrangement on her wondrous 2024 album Something in the Room She Moves, but she felt a lingering desire to expand the texture and stretch out the harmony. Though she could hear the potential orchestration in her head, Something was already abundant with layers of sound by the time she finished it. She stuck with the original form of “Materia,” then, her cresting voice and blue Wurlitzer hosting games of harmonic hide-and-seek above subtle electronics.
Kat Greta's new indie-pop single ‘I Know What This Is’ has her exploring the universal sting of rejection, those ‘almost’ relationships and the bittersweet, frustrating dance of it all. ‘I Know What This Is’ and the accompanying music video is out September 11.
"I’m proud of that. It has some reversed pedal steel on it, and there’s this one vocal sample at the end from a time some friends were singing in a tunnel in the woods - the same tunnel is featured on the cover of the album, which feels significant in this secret little way," they continue. "The song speaks to the feeling of being stuck on a past relationship, revisiting things over and over and looking for glimmers of hope that it could be real again. This is a big theme in the album - being stuck on the past - although each song has its own subtle emotional valence to that experience.” thelineofbestfit
“True Mountain Laurel make a strong case that we just need to get our friends together and do some vivacious yapping, set it to a dusty, forlornly hopeful folk tune and rise, together.” - Exclaim!
Accompanying the album today is the new video for “East of Anything”, a song that was written as an act of persistence in the face of creative exhaustion and lives in a midnight room where memory, loneliness, drunkenness, and comfort all start to bleed into one another. The song is a steady flame in the face of emotional dislocation; something to focus your eyes on when you’re feeling slightly outside of reality, outside of clarity, outside of where you thought you were meant to be; east of anything.
“East Of Anything” was “our first whack at co-writing together,” explains Haley and Sam. “This song sat in such a magical middle place between each of our songwriting and musical tendencies. We silently danced around the subject of who would ‘get the song’ for a little while before we realized it belonged exactly where it was; that was the inception of True Mountain Laurel.”
Bitw is the solo project of Welsh musician Gruff ab Arwel. A committed DIY artist, he has built a career of sorts on his own terms, creating lo-fi art pop (not his description) that takes itself seriously without taking himself too seriously. Now in his mid-thirties, Gruff has made the seamless transition from failing musician to failed musician, and is finally enjoying the freedom that comes with having nothing left to prove.
His latest album, Gaddo Glaw, is his most homemade and cost-effective work yet; a record made almost entirely alone with a borrowed Portastudio and a steady supply of bad news. The songs find Gruff generally giving up on hope and finding peace instead through accepting our impending doom. His first entirely Welsh-language release, Gaddo Glaw confronts geopolitical conflict, the climate crisis and the general feeling that things are falling apart, all delivered in easy-to-digest pop song form. Bleak in subject matter yet full of warmth, the album stops short of finding a beacon of hope, but nevertheless holds on for dear life to love as one of the best things full stop.
