Johanna Samuels makes songs that can turn a tiny memory into something that suddenly feels enormous. On this episode, we get into Sorry, Kid, revisiting old songs, getting older, the weirdness of memory, and how the places and people in our lives keep finding their way into our music. Johanna is thoughtful, funny, and refreshingly honest about the messy process of making sense of the past while still moving forward. A great conversation with a songwriter who knows how to make the personal feel universal—and a lot of fun along the way.
THAO will release her first new album in 6 years titled Show Me on October 30 via Kill Rock Stars. It was co-produced by THAO and Merrill Garbus and Nate Brenner of Tune-Yards, and features contributions from Neko Case, The Linda Lindas, and Adrian Quesada (Black Pumas).
The new collection is a deeply personal exploration of her journey toward full embodiment as THAO’s personal life underwent a reckoning: divorce, the upending of a home. “I learned that the point of life is not to emerge unscathed, and that I don't want to operate as I always have — masking fear as indifference,” she says. “This album is a real-time record-keeping of my life evolving into a different relationship with love and desire over the last few years. For example, I came out publicly years ago but I’ve never really written a song about sex or queer identity. So, that’s in there.”
“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.”
Our upcoming album Beyonder is full of sounds of the natural world, and the ocean plays a special role in that. If you came to our Royal Albert Hall show in March, the soundscapes we used there included the songs of humpback whales, a person diving underwater, and sounds of a storm at sea. We have populated our songs over the years with sea birds and crashing waves, and it's a habitat that has really fed so much of what we've done lyrically and musically. So the ocean is something we really care about.
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.
“The band captures a swampy, heat-drenched collective chemistry, managing to sound shaggy and loose while careening along the track’s winding grooves.” - Under the Radar
“An intimacy underlined by a certain sense of disbelief” - Various Small Flames
“... An introspective folk record with balls, sort of like if Pedro the Lion pushed ‘Control’ even further, or maybe like Good Looks, more recently.” - Austin Town Hall
“blown-out folksy rock" - Post Trash
"Austin Wilson might be Providence based, but he hasn’t forgotten his roots in Houma, Louisiana and the people he grew up alongside, the people he left behind.” - Americana UK
What happens when a non-binary, trans artist comes back to country music and refuses to leave anything out? On Assigned Country Singer At Birth, Rae Spoon puts trans lives, disability, harm reduction, religious trauma, solidarity and colonialism alongside the trucks, beer and heartbreak traditionally associated with the genre. On , we get into why country still matters, what happens when you make music outside the boundaries of expectation, and what it means to claim a genre—and a country—that hasn’t always made room for you.
Rae Spoon is a musician, songwriter, producer, multi-instrumentalist, and author. Rae has been nominated for two Polaris Music Prizes, a Lambda Literary Award, and a Western Canadian Music Award. They have toured internationally (Canada, Europe, the USA, Australia, Asia).. They just released their thirteenth album Assigned Country Singer At Birth.
Reveal Party's sophomore album, “Prettiest Flower,” blends her Midwest emo and lo-fi pop influences with elements of stadium rock and eclectic instrumental folk, creating a cohesive, self-referential, and wistfully nostalgic tour de force.
The record tells a coming-of-age story rooted in the trans experience, presenting a raw yet tender autobiography where truths are revealed between the lines and space is given to unspoken feelings. It explores the ache of transformation, the dreams simmering beneath the surface of a chrysalis, and the anxiety of being both larva and butterfly, marking an ambitious and emotionally resonant new chapter for this self-described professional yearner. - Livia Wendland
About the track, Sabrina Teitelbaum explains, "You're trying to figure out what you want your life to look like, and what you want playing at your wedding, but you don't even know where to start. You're picking the wrong song.”
Brooklyn-based artist Rachel Bochner has just released her new single "Collar", an indie-pop track about the complicated feelings that come with developing chemistry with someone who's already in a relationship. Built around a waltz-like rhythm with crunchy guitars and a steady build, the track captures the temptation, yearning and moral dilemma that comes with wondering what might happen if those feelings were acted on.
Darren Hayman's been at this for three decades, and he's still treating songwriting like a puzzle he hasn't solved. Best known for fronting Hefner — the band a record label basically forced into existence by asking "is this a band or just you?" — Hayman's gone on to release records governed by self-imposed rules: witch trials, place names, entire concept records where the research threatens to swallow the songs whole. On this episode, he talks getting jumped after a gig, turning a fractured skull into The Violence, and the mild indignity of people treating your trauma like content. Also: 10,000 unfinished voice memos, an "Archivist" untangling his back catalog, and a theory that bands should die young. Not a comeback story — a guy who never stopped.
"My digital back catalogue has been in a mess for some time, partly due to many records being released under different names, lineups, and labels. I'm very relieved to be having some help with the process now and can make one of my most important records available for streaming. It's so important to me to have this record available again. It's the hardest I've ever worked, and I believe it sounds like nothing else in my back catalogue. The Violence is a double album about the English Civil War and the East Anglian Witch Trials in the 17th century. I'm also pleased to include several previously unreleased tracks, which increase the scope of the work." – Darren Hayman (he/him)
So Faint is the collaborative project of Lyn Heinemann and Hannah Georgas, born from a chance encounter in a Vancouver recording studio and shaped by a decade-long friendship. After years on separate paths, with Lyn stepping away from bands, but still writing music for herself and Hannah building an acclaimed international music career that has recently seen her join Broken Social Scene for their latest LP Remember The Humans, the two reunited in 2023 to create the music they’d been quietly missing.
“'Landlord”'was in a big pile of songs I started in 2023," Glaser says of the track. "I had just turned 29 and was essentially starting over. Most painful, beautiful, necessary year of my life. I was bopping around between friend’s guest rooms and my parent’s basement in St. Louis. Writing is genuinely all I wanted to do. This was one of the first that came out that really excited me… I started playing the little arpeggiated synth line & just let it loop for hours.. slowly wrote words over it and added a clunky guitar part. It was the first one off “The Lodge In Miller County” that I brought to other people. I made a demo with Owen Lewis & Jamie Dick in Nashville.. Hearing real drums kind of turned the “I’m making these into album” switch on. It also gave me maybe the most severe case of demo-itis I’ve ever had?? There are probably 14 different versions of this song."
NP York delivers a warm and spirited indie folk-rock anthem with As Bold as a heart, built around ringing guitars, organic instrumentation, and a powerful, memorable chorus. lastdaydeaf
Four albums deep, Toronto's Kiwi Jr. arrive at Blowin' Up by doing something quietly radical: playing it live, together, in a room. Jeremy Gaudet traded the tight compression and Pro Tools tinkering of past records for the sound of four people breathing the same air—guitar solos left unswapped, drums left unmoved. The result opens up where earlier Kiwi Jr. records clenched, trading whimsical, pop-culture-soaked lyricism for something more spacious and unguarded. Gaudet talks candidly about writing from title first, riff last, and the Neil Young listening sessions that shaped the room-sound instinct. Out August 7th, it's the sound of a band trusting the take.
A guitar that sounds better because it isn't perfect.
A handmade sleeve. A tiny label. A song recorded in a bedroom.
A record passed from one friend to another.
But perhaps most of all, indiepop has always been intimate.
This compilation brings together songs from different corners of the indiepop world, connected by the same spirit: melody, independence, friendship, intimacy, and the simple joy of making and sharing music.
There are no rules about what indiepop should sound like. It can be jangly, noisy, sweet or melancholic. What matters is the feeling the sense that these songs were made because someone had something they wanted to say, sing, or share.
And maybe that's why the pop kids have always found each other.
Dummy — the Los Angeles-based band of Alex Ewell, Emma Maatman, Nathan O’Dell, Joe Trainor, and Lance Umble — announce the new album, do you love the color of the sky?, out October 16th with lead single/video “Full Spectrum Dominance” and a fall North American tour. With do you love the color of the sky? Dummy crafts the perfect anti-zeitgeist record, freezing you into their incorporeal moment of time, freed from the rat race and trendiness, embracing insularity to the point that it somehow becomes the future. Listen to "Full Spectrum Dominance" & pre-save here, pre-order on vinyl, CD, cassette here!
Forget Them Wendy are an indie pop/grunge duo made up of Newcastle-based songwriter Laura James, and Edinburgh-born producer and guitarist Oliver Price, now living in London. The band take their name from a line in J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan: “Forget them, Wendy. Forget them all. Come with me where you'll never, never have to worry about grown up things again.” Shaped by their shared love of 90s records from bands including The Cranberries, Smashing Pumpkins and The Breeders, the pair combine indie pop melodies with grunge influences and playful, self-aware songwriting.
Their latest single, “Apple Pie”, sees Forget Them Wendy showing a softer side, with acoustic guitar taking centre stage. Written in the height of summer, the track is inspired by those hazy, lazy days that seem to stretch on forever. Laura sings, “‘Life’s an apple pie, let it float on by’”, a line she admits she doesn’t really know the meaning of, but somehow knows is important.
