indie artist of the month
The Album
Yard, out now on ANTI- Records.
The Origin
Guitarist-producer Henry Stoehr and drummer Teddy Matthews met as youngsters in a McDonald’s ball pit in their native Madison, Wis., and they’ve been playing music together almost as long. They formed a band with buddy and future Slow Pulp bassist Alex Leeds as preteens and kept making music as teens and, later, students at University of Wisconsin, Madison. That’s where they met singer-guitarist Emily Massey, who was in another band, but began writing with Stoehr for fun.
The creative relationship blossomed and Stoehr invited Massey to join the nascent Slow Pulp. Initially, Massey explains, she “was just kind of an auxiliary member,” helping with rhythm guitar and backing vocals. But while recording 2017’s EP2, Stoehr and Leeds asked Massey to sing lead on a couple of their songs. “They were like, ‘How about you sing this song as well?’ And then we started sprinkling in the songs that we had been writing together,” Massey, now 28, recalls. “It just kind of slowly transitioned into me kind of taking the frontperson role.”
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The Sound
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“Lucinda Williams’ album Car Wheels On A Gravel Road, that’s my gold [standard], like, this is how I like music to sound, production-wise” says Stoehr, 29, who produced Slow Pulp’s debut full-length, 2020’s Moveys, and its follow-up, September’s Yard. Massey shares the affinity: She wrote some of Yard‘s songs at a cabin where Williams’ Grammy-nominated 2001 album Essence was one of the few CDs on hand. “She’s just an incredible songwriter,” says Massey, noting the “production cues that [Slow Pulp] took from that Americana world for some of the songs” on Yard.
Stoehr and Massey also gush about the soundtrack to seminal ’00s teen TV drama The O.C., explaining the impact the set of canonical alt-rock and indie-pop songs had on them as younger Millennials. “Overall, on [Yard], there’s a little more earnestness and exposed emotion. And I feel like that [O.C.] era of music was all about that.”
And when it comes to the tried-and-true “Artist A x Artist B = Artist C” equation, one could do worse than encapsulating Slow Pulp’s emotional and vibrant indie-rock than “Lucinda Williams x The O.C. soundtrack.” On Yard, the band’s upped the rootsy quotient – like on late-album standout “Broadview,” a gem laden with steel guitar, harmonica, and banjo that sounds like Slow Pulp exhumed and rerecorded a lost demo from Neil Young’s Harvest.
The Record
Like many young bands, Slow Pulp’s rise is forever linked to the pandemic. The quartet finished its debut, Moveys, in the early months of COVID; around that time, Massey says her own health issues and a serious car accident involving her parents were among the factors that forced the band to “take a breather for a second.”
Writing for Yard began in earnest in early 2022, and by February 2023 the band had submitted the record – and signed with eminent indie label ANTI-, currently home to an eclectic roster that includes Fleet Foxes, Mavis Staples, MJ Lenderman and Japandroids. “They were very down for just letting us take a lot of creative control, which is something that was really important to us,” Massey says.
As she did for Moveys, Massey tracked many of Yard‘s vocals in her musician father’s home studio – “It wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows; we definitely are good at arguing,” she says with a laugh – and Stoehr ornamented tracks the band recorded with “sound candy type of stuff” to make them pop. The technical prowess helps Slow Pulp’s sharper-than-ever songwriting, chock-full of huge hooks and vivid lyrics, shine.
“Songs like ‘Broadview’ and ‘Yard’ have a different flavor than some of the music that we’ve done before,” Massey says. “And ANTI-, those were some of their favorite songs, like from the jump. That felt cool to have a label be excited about new things and new sounds that are kind of taking a risk.”
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The Breakthrough
When Slow Pulp released EP2, influential YouTuber thelazylazyme gave its closing track, “Preoccupied,” a boost by sharing it. “That was the turning point of, like, ‘Maybe we should look into taking this a little bit more seriously,’” says Massey, explaining how the recognition prompted Slow Pulp to relocate to Chicago.
In 2019, the band opened for Alex G on tour – and noticed a pronounced change in the audiences compared to other support slots it had played before. “That was the first tour we went on where the person we were opening for’s fans were pretty receptive,” Stoehr says. “People were liking it.”
And when touring opened back up following the pandemic, Slow Pulp shored up its indie-rock bona fides with coveted slots supporting Alvvays, Pixies and Death Cab For Cutie.
The Future
In early November, Slow Pulp took the stage – to Phantom Planet’s O.C. theme “California,” naturally – for a sold-out show at New York’s Bowery Ballroom, the third of three sold-out Manhattan club shows. The raucous Big Apple crowd has been the norm since Slow Pulp hit the road days after Yard’s release.
“One of our favorite shows that we played on this tour was in Minneapolis,” says Massey, recalling the band’s second stop this fall. “The album hadn’t even been out for a week, and the crowd sang every song. It was just like, ‘What?! How is this happening?’”
The band’s wrapping the year with a European tour – and is already booked for Spain’s Primavera Sound and the Netherlands’ Best Kept Secret in June 2024. Says Massey: “It feels like this big dream is coming true.”
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The Piece of Studio Equipment They Cannot Live Without
Stoehr: “The AKG C414 [microphone]. The gold and black one.”Massey: “My MacBook.”
The Artist They Believe Deserves More Attention
Massey: “Ratboys. They could be huge. The record they put out this year is really so, so cool.”Stoehr: “They’re an amazing band. There’s this other small band from Madison called She’s Green that I think are really sick.”
The Advice Every Indie Artist Needs to Hear
Massey: “Have fun. That’s something that we like have to remind ourselves of sometimes. I’ve had a really hard time letting myself just fail and make things that are horrible. That’s OK! Make stuff that’s really bad. Make bad songs and it gets you to the good ones. Don’t be so hard on yourself.”
The Most Surprising Thing About the Music Industry So Far
Massey: [long pause] “People listen to our music.” [laughs]Stoehr: “Yeah, probably that.”Massey: “That’s pretty surprising, always.”
The Thing They Hope Fans Take Away From Their Album
Massey: “Letting yourself have a certain compassion for yourself. That’s the big takeaway. We all have moments of a lot of self-doubt; there are a lot of things that we’re so hard on ourselves for. And to be able to work towards finding the places where you feel you’re able to care for yourself, outside of all the things that are happening. A lot of this record is about gratitude and reflecting on relationships and things that get you to the place you are now.”
The Album
Light, Dark, Light Again out Oct. 27 via Gracie Music/AWAL Recordings
The Origin
Angie McMahon’s first taste of the stage came as the lead singer of a soul-inspired band called The Fabric. She met the boys in the band while at a private Catholic girls school in her home country of Australia, while the guys had gone to the associated boys school.
“We emerged from that traumatic experience somewhat together,” McMahon says. But being the head of a soul band wasn’t McMahon’s lifelong dream, and she applied her skills to a solo career.
McMahon entered songwriting competitions to “see if I was good,” and because she “needed deadlines,” she jokes. She entered the Telstra Road to Discovery competition, where the grand prize was a trip to Nashville to record an EP. “It’s the promise of bridging the gap between our world [Australia] and the big American world of music,” she says. “The reality is our industry, our market is small. The big stuff, the big dreams a lot of the time live over [in America].”
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She didn’t win the Nashville trip, but the extra prize that year was an opening slot on Bon Jovi’s 2013 Because We Can tour. Not only did she open for Bon Jovi, but also for Kid Rock, who was second billed on the lineup.
“It was super weird. Imagine a stadium show, the first 15 minutes after the gates have opened and there’s not that many people there,” she says. “It’s a big deal, but it’s also relatively low-stakes.”
The tour left McMahon feeling “pretty shell-shocked,” and decided to take time off to figure out what she wanted to say as a songwriter. In 2017, she released the single “Slow Mover,” and by 2019 released her debut album Salt, which won the Australian Independent Record Awards for Best Independent Rock Album or EP.
The Sound
McMahon can easily fall into the category of singer-songwriter, which often evokes the image of an artist alone onstage with a guitar. But after years of fronting a loud nine-piece soul band and her trial by fire in front of Bon Jovi’s stadium crowds, her voice has the power to fill just about any room — whether she’s dealing with big feelings about relationships, or in the quiet moments when she’s grappling with her mental health.
She tends to describe her sound based on the different artists she feels are living within or, at least, within the intention behind the choices. “There’s a [Bruce] Springsteen rock thread that carries me through,” she says, “and there’s Patti Smith or Chrissie Hynde-like vocal intensity and, on a good day, a courage that I’m trying to tap into.”
She adds Bon Iver, Australian artist Missy Higgins and “just a sprinkle of ‘80s synth sometimes.”
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The Record
Light, Dark, Light Again is an appropriate title for McMahon’s deeply personal second album. While the titular phrase appears in the final track “Making It Through,” the theme feels weaved into nearly every track, as McMahon ebbs and flows from happier stories to tragic ones and back again.
It’s a rock album with its louder moments like the riot grrrl-esque shouting that closes out “Letting Go” or the staccato chorus of “Divine Fault Line.” In its quieter moments like “Fireball Whiskey,” McMahon’s voice is captivating as the drums build tension and she describes a crumbling relationship and navigating her anxiety. With themes ranging from climate change to psychology, McMahon has created an album worth consuming in its entirety.
“I was trying to summarize and articulate things that felt so massive in my body,” she explains. “There are things that are left out entirely and places that I didn’t touch – not out of fear, but out of the intention of wanting to create the ‘light again’ part for myself,” she says.
The Breakthrough
In 2017, McMahon released the contemplative, guitar-heavy single “Slow Mover,” which has been certified double platinum by the Australian Recording Industry Association. The track puts McMahon’s big voice over deceptively profound lyrics about not wanting to buy fried chicken at 4am and trying to be kinder to herself. McMahon recalls the song coming out accompanied by an assortment of feelings — both hopeful and terrifying.
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“I was suddenly needing to have an internet persona, and have my s–t together for interviews that I would maybe read later and tear myself apart for because I hadn’t articulated something well enough,” she says. “But aside from the mental health aspect, it was really nice to be able to start building a world where I was allowed to create and release stuff, which felt really special as well as really scary. I think that feeling remains.”
The Future
McMahon will tour the album starting next year, but in the meantime, she plans to get back to writing and try her hand at creating more beats. “I’m not sure if [making beats] is what I want to do next, but I want to expand my skills. I really love it, making experimental stuff,” she says. Her next record, she speculates, could be an experimental meditation/atmospheric album.
The Studio Equipment She Couldn’t Live Without
“My guitar. But I also have this new instrument that I really love. It’s the Yamaha Reface CP keyboard. I was introduced to it in the studio while making this record. It’s the size of a laptop or a bit longer. It just sounds amazing.”
The Artist She Believes Deserves More Attention
“One is a dear friend of mine, her name is Annie-Rose Maloney. She has changed my life because of her approach to living which is just not centered around capitalism or industry. She’s very grounded and writes really beautiful songs. She has like, no music online, but she’s gonna release a record in the future.
“Also, Mimi Gilbert. Just amazing musicianship and like Annie, a very kind, grounded person who has been playing music for a long time and moves people so much when they the performance.”
The Takeaway That She Hopes Fans Have When They Hear the Album
“I hope it ignites hope. For me, it’s about knowing that there is good waiting on the other side of whatever you’re afraid of and a brand new life for yourself. Maybe it can be an encouragement to go towards what your fear is. For me, the fear changes day to day: rejection, crippling depression. When I have been in the crippling unsureness about being a musician, the stuff that makes me feel like it’s worth it or like it’s doing some good and I’m not just a self-absorbed narcissist, is if I get a message that’s like, ‘I felt seen by that. I felt understood by that. Thank you for making it.’”
The Album
The Window, out August 25 on Topshelf
The Origin
For Ratboys’ Julia Steiner and Dave Sagan, college started paying off before taking a single class. “Dave and I met during freshman orientation” at Notre Dame, Steiner tells Billboard. “We were both music nerds in a sea of – in a student body that isn’t full of music nerds. We showed up to college and neither of us had plans to start a band or to seek out people to play music with. We just kind of found each other really quickly.”
Before long, Steiner and Sagan were posting their recordings online and playing regional DIY shows. “The first community that we found ourselves in was in the south suburbs of Chicago, which is where Dave and [bassist] Sean [Neumann] grew up,” Steiner says. “I immediately got welcomed into this community of bands and music freaks down there that loved every type of music and were really passionate about having house shows with a million different types of bands.”
In the mid-’10s, Ratboys went from Chicago upstarts to Windy City rock fixtures, cementing their reputation with Topshelf releases AOID in 2015 and GN in 2017. That year, the quartet solidified its current lineup with the additions of Nuemann and drummer Marcus Nuccio; all four played on Printer’s Devil, Ratboys’ critical breakthrough that arrived just before the pandemic in early 2020.
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The Sound
Years ago, Steiner referred to Ratboys as “post-country” – riffing on an inside joke with Sagan about the vagueness of terms like “post-hardcore” and “post-rock” – and the descriptor has followed the project, thanks to its vivid lyricism and natural fusion of sounds. Sagan’s description today is more direct: “We’re like Tom Petty,” he says. “We’re just a tight rock band.” (Steiner chimes in, “How humble of you, Dave!”)
Tongue-in-cheek or not, Steiner’s description has proven prescient for both Ratboys and their peers. “I think you were kind of ahead of your time there a little, Julia,” Nuccio says. “I mean, look at the landscape of indie-rock right now. So many bands, like Big Thief and Wednesday and Florry and all amazing bands, it kind of is like post-country, right? In the way that post-rock or post-hardcore is taking a genre and then adding a little modern twist to it.”
“Some of the tunes that we make are within – or at least paying homage to – that country tradition,” Steiner concludes.
The Record
While on tour with Foxing in 2018, Ratboys met Chris Walla, who had produced their tourmates’ acclaimed album Nearer My God out of his Seattle recording studio. In 2021, with a stable of new songs penned in quarantine, Ratboys cold-called Walla, best known for his time in Death Cab For Cutie, to helm the boards for what would become The Window.
When a tour later that year took Ratboys through Seattle, the band met with Walla; he asked them about their vision for their next album during on a walk back from a grocery store in the pouring rain. “We immediately dove into the details as if we’d known each other forever,” Steiner says. “He’s just a very easy person to spend time with.”
Soon, the band was sending demos to Walla for creative guidance, and in early 2022, Ratboys returned to Seattle to for a month to record, marking their first sessions outside of Chicago. Neumann says Ratboys cherished the opportunity to immerse and “make a record without thinking about the outside world,” comparing the sessions to staying over at a friend’s house. “There was one couch in there, and everybody had their preferred spot on the couch,” Sagan adds. “By the end of it, everybody had their own, like, perfectly formed butt groove.” (“That was the provisional title of the record, actually,” Steiner quips.)
Walla helped the band record live-to-tape for the first time, and also proved an empathetic sounding board for The Window‘s lyrical content. “I told him, ‘A lot of the songs are more personal, more real, more honest than some of the things we’ve made before – like, I just want it to be very real, unflinchingly so,’” Steiner recalls. “He was game for that. We really looked at everything in the face and [were] full-steam ahead with some of these ideas.”
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The Breakthrough
In January 2020, Ratboys received an unlikely boost. Organizers for the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign contacted the band to open for one of the senator’s Iowa rallies, and Steiner and Sagan braved a blizzard to play the gig. When Sanders took the stage for his speech, he thanked Ratboys – but Steiner’s phone died as she tried to film the moment for posterity.
“I was like, ‘Well, bummer, I guess I’ll never get to share that with anyone,’” she says. Luckily, a friend captured the moment – and endearing footage of Sanders saying “Let me thank the Ratboys for their music” went viral.
The episode dovetailed with the rollout for Printer’s Devil, Ratboys’ most accomplished set of songs yet, which arrived that February to rave reviews. The pandemic disrupted the band’s planned headline tour, which was to begin March 14, 2020, but Ratboys made lemonade from lemons, diving into livestreaming and writing. To celebrate its 10th anniversary, Ratboys re-recorded several early songs – and a new one, the instant quarantine classic “Go Outside” – for the 2021 full-length Happy Birthday, Ratboy!; the project coincided with Ratboys’ first overtures to Walla.
Two years after Happy Birthday, Ratboys returned with the longest song of its career, the eight-and-half-minute “Black Earth, WI.” The expansive rocker – along with other new singles “It’s Alive!,” “The Window,” “Crossed That Line,” and “Morning Zoo” (out today) – flashed the band’s recent lyrical and musical growth.
The Future
Ratboys co-headlined a tour with Wild Pink in 2021, but the band is excited to finally make good on its nixed 2020 touring plans and head out on a headline run of its own next month. “We’ve never had the opportunity to do a real, ticketed headline tour,” Steiner says with excitement. “It’s finally happening!”
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The Piece of Studio Equipment They Cannot Live Without
Steiner: “A roll of gaffe tape. Very useful to have around, not just for cymbal-dampening purposes – which I know nothing about, that’s like black magic to me – but I found a very, very important lesson while vocal tracking on this record: sometimes in order to unlock the best vocal performance, you need some sort of physical object to interact with while you’re singing. At one point, I grabbed this heavy-ass roll of gaffe tape that we had and just the weight of it in my hands, I was able to sing better. That was indispensable to me throughout the session.”
The Artist They Believe Deserves More Attention
Neumann cites Chicago pal Nnamdï, and Nuccio teases “a secret Nnamdï surprise coming in the Ratboys world, for any of the vinyl heads out there” who buy The Window on wax.
The Advice Every Indie Artist Needs to Hear
Sagan: “Play a show before you start thinking about any Spotify listeners. Don’t worry about how people receive your music – just play it first.”
The Thing That Needs to Change in the Music Industry
Steiner: “The music industry today kind of treats music like a public utility, and I really fear that there’s no way to go back from that entirely. The value of a song, the value of an artistic idea has kind of been washed away. If there’s some way that we could reframe the way we look at music… honestly, we’ve talked about this in the band: Spotify should be $100 a month. It’s so cheap. It’s just a matter of finding that tipping point where people will agree that this has value and be willing to pay more for it.”
THE ALBUM
An Inbuilt Fault, out Friday (May 5) on Partisan Records.
THE ORIGIN
You wouldn’t recognize the Westerman of 2016. In the earliest days of his life as a professional artist, Will Westerman sported long, curly hair and played folk music that most often earned him comparisons to Nick Drake. By the time he began getting more notoriety, he had totally transformed. Now in his early thirties, he keeps his hair shorn close and wears sleeker clothes, mirroring the evolution of his music.
In the late ‘10s, he began collaborating with the producer and fellow Londoner Bullion, who helped Westerman achieve a more electronic sheen. His early singles — including the breakthrough 2018 track “Confirmation,” which ignited a flurry of blog hype — had an alien quality, singer-songwriter fare put through a strange, otherworldly filter.
Since “Confirmation,” the path has been as circuitous as Westerman’s exploratory songwriting. His debut album, Your Hero Is Not Dead, was finished and ready for release in 2019, but he alludes to various speed bumps caused by some people who “behaved badly.” Eventually it arrived right in the summer of 2020, with Westerman unable to tour or promote it properly due to the pandemic. Afterwards, he underwent a crisis of faith, wondering whether he wanted to release music anymore. “It took me about a year to get back in the headspace where I thought it was worth making music again,” he admits. “I remembered why all this stuff started in the first place.”
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THE SOUND
Part of the power in Westerman’s recent music is the contrast between warped guitars and synth textures, and Westerman himself. He has always had a rich, expressive voice — it can be crystalline, but also not without a smoky huskiness. As a child, Westerman sang in choirs, and recently found solace in revisiting unaccompanied plainsong as a way of reconnecting with the human voice during long stretches of lockdown isolation. It gives him a unique melodic sensibility, where he may wind and surge beyond the lines we usually associate with pop song structures.
Sophomore album An Inbuilt Fault was intended to be serpentine and unpredictable as well. “I wanted it to feel very close, and less sculpted,” Westerman says. “I wanted it to have a breathing quality.” At the time, he was demoing over polyrhythmic loops, experimenting and writing for himself without any expectation of necessarily finishing another album. In addition to the comfort of choral music, he was digging way into krautrock. “It was the sense of freedom, the sound of freeform expression,” he recalls. “It was the music I needed at that time.”
While Westerman’s guitar is still pivotal to his music, An Inbuilt Fault takes the organic/artificial tension of his music to a new extreme, putting his voice to the forefront over a newly percussive backdrop. Abandoning the beats of past recordings, he wanted to embrace playing live in a room with human beings again — once he was finally able to. An Inbuilt Fault ended up being a document of a group of musicians wrestling an elusive sound into being, all tumbling drums and guitars surrounded by all manner of flickering, alluring textures at the songs’ edges.
THE RECORD
With everything on hold, Westerman decided it was time to try a big life change he’d thought about for years — he wanted to move to Athens. Embarking on a “half-baked” plan to live in a van in the Balkans, he started across Europe and stopped to visit his father in rural Italy for a week. Thanks to more COVID lockdowns, he ended up being there for six months.
For all that time, Westerman had very little human interaction aside from seeing his father. He began writing songs again, mostly as a way of keeping himself sane, but eventually saw an album taking shape. When it was time to record, he reached out to Big Thief drummer/producer James Krivchenia — who he’d briefly hit it off with at a show immediately before the pandemic — and with Krivchenia’s touch and ear for percussion, An Inbuilt Fault has that more alive feeling Westerman was looking for.
“I wanted to jump off the cliff creatively,” Westerman says. “I wanted to put myself in an environment that was completely alien to me as a way of trying to grow, to break out of the solipsistic way the music had been forming up until that point.”
That isn’t to say the core ethos of Westerman’s writing was lost in the process. The music unspools and ambles, so it takes longer for these songs to sink into your head, but they don’t leave once they’re there. His melodies are as gorgeous as ever: one of the album’s most simultaneously jarring and transcendent moments is when he slides into the chorus of “Idol:RE-Run,” which happens to wring a hilarious amount of beauty out of the word “motherf–ker.” (“It wakes you up,” he quips.) Meanwhile, “A Lens Turning” uses a dexterous, knotty groove as underpinning for navigating a similarly tangled existential crisis. Closer “Pilot Was A Dancer” has an almost ‘90s alt-rock tone to it, a cathartic burst of guitars as Westerman tells an apocalyptic story about the last human being alive on Earth.
Though Westerman’s songs are inspired by an array of experiences, both his and others, he rarely is autobiographical. At the same time, he acknowledges much of An Inbuilt Fault is traversing relatively dark themes, its title a reflection on our inherent fallibility. At the end of it all, he’s made another striking album that also feels like a hard reset after the ellipsis of 2020. It feels like he’s starting again.
THE FUTURE
Westerman did eventually make it to Athens, and his early days there were wild — things were just reopening, and parties thronged the streets at all hours of the night. One of the singles from An Inbuilt Fault, “CSI: Petralona,” is a rare moment that does derive more directly from Westerman’s actual life, inspired by a “near-death” experience and the kindness of strangers. But since then, it seems he’s settled into his new life in Greece.
“It’s almost the opposite of London,” he muses. “It’s slow-paced. It’s lugubrious chaos. Nothing really works very well but there’s a strange internal logic to it where it does.”
With some distance from London, and from the hubs of the music industry in western Europe and North America, Westerman has found he’s been more clear-headed creatively. He’s come out the other side of questioning his life as a musician revitalized and re-centered. “It remains the same irrespective of whether five people are listening or five thousand,” he says. “The scale is irrelevant in terms of process, and when I remember that it is very helpful. I know I’ll continue to do it now in some capacity, because I know I need to do it.”
To that end, he mentions he’s already close to finishing the recording of another album.
HIS FAVORITE PIECE OF GEAR
“I’ve been using this Meris Hedra pedal. It has three pitch shifters but it’s got secondary functions of delay and feedback. I think you can make a whole record with just a voice and this pedal. It would be an interesting thing to do that as a confined exercise. I don’t really understand it. It’s such a deep piece of equipment I don’t know half of it.”
THE ARTIST THAT HE THINKS NEEDS MORE ATTENTION
“There’s loads. There’s an artist called Clara Mann. She’s almost folk revival, slightly maudlin, sadly beautiful minimalistic guitar singer-songwriter. I really enjoyed listening to that yesterday so I’ll go with that now. That’s a difficult question because there’s literally thousands.”
THE THING THAT HE THINKS NEEDS TO CHANGE IN THE MUSIC INDUSTRY
“I don’t think there is enough protection for artists — in general in the industry, but particularly for younger artists. There’s a disposability culture, where there isn’t really a huge amount of accountability for the way older people in the industry can exploit the good will or naivety of younger people when they’re offering something. It’s not like designing a washing machine. It’s a different sort of thing.
“I think it would be good that, if [and] when people are exploited through their inexperience, there was some kind of culpability for the people who are doing that. Currently there is none. Seemingly there are very few bodies of people you can go to when things go wrong. Generally the people who carry the financial and emotional burden when those things happen are the people least equipped to do it, and that’s an imbalance that is not right.”
THE PIECE OF ADVICE HE BELIEVES EVERY NEW INDIE ARTIST NEEDS TO HEAR
Westerman pauses for a while, and then says simply: “Keep going.”
The Project
Blondshell arrived April 7 on Partisan via Knitting Factory. and included the artist’s 2022 debut single “Olympus.”
The Origin
Sabrina Teitelbaum wanted to be a singer since she was a kid growing up in Manhattan. In 2015, she moved to Los Angeles to attend the University of Southern California’s Popular Music Program, and eventually launched a solo pop project called Baum. But it wasn’t until she wrote the broody and slow-burning “Olympus” that her career clicked, and Blondshell was born. Producer Yves Rothman encouraged her to write more songs in the same raw and rock-inspired style, which she recalls felt “intimidating” at first. But the songs, most of which make up Blondshell, tumbled out quickly. “It was just obvious to me that this stuff was more who I am,” she says now.
The Sound
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Teitelbaum was raised on rock greats like The Rolling Stones and is a big fan of The National (she says the band’s black-and-white album art for Trouble Will Find Me inspired her own debut cover). At the same time, having grown up in the 2000s, she was listening to pop icons like Christina Aguilera, Kelly Clarkson, Gwen Stefani, “and all these people who had higher belting ranges,” she recalls — adding that for a long time, she thought that she had to sing that way, too.
It took a song like the confessional “Sepsis,” one of her favorite songs to perform live, to make her rethink that approach. “It’s just in a good place for my voice,” she says of the track. “And when I started writing the album, particularly with ‘Sepsis,’ I was like, ‘Oh, I don’t have to do that. I’m just gonna sing in the most comfortable part of my voice.’ It’s fun to sing that one because it’s just easy.”
The Record
Blondshell had a “relaxing celebration” when her album arrived, performing at Amoeba on release night and heading to the beach the following day. Blondshell debuted at No. 88 on Billboard’s Top Current Album Sales chart, becoming her first entry on any tally. Of signing with an indie label, she says “I didn’t wanna press that button that was like, ‘This is exactly who I’m gonna be for the rest of my career.’ I really wanted the freedom to change that up … I’ve been thinking about, ‘What did I bring in as references for this album?’ And it was a lot of 90s guitar driven music. I am always gonna have that as a reference, because that’s the music that I love.”
The Breakthrough
Though Blondshell only debuted in 2022, the artist says getting to this point – where in recent months she’s played her favorite venue The Fonda and made her late night television debut on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon – has required years of work: “First [it was], ‘How do I even get on Spotify? How do I meet producers and how do I go to sessions?’ Just years of step-by-step. And then, ‘What do I wanna sound like as a performer? What do I want my show to look like?’
“I was getting kind of scared the last couple years because I was like, ‘I don’t know what I would do in a long term kind of way if it wasn’t music,’” she recalls. “I think people put so much pressure on musicians, especially women, to know exactly who you are as an artist at such a young age, and to find success and all these ideas — like, ‘If you’re not having success by the time you’re like 25, then it’s not gonna happen.’ All these messages that got sent while I was growing up were kind of freaking me out for a period of time.”
The moment that started to shift, she says, was when she played her first show as Blondshell last summer: “That felt like a big moment, because I put ‘Olympus’ out and I think people hadn’t heard that kind of music [from me]. Some of my friends hadn’t heard it, people I had worked with. And then I got to be like, ‘See, I’ve been working really hard at this thing and getting this live show ready,’ and I got to show people.”
The Future
Blondshell is already excited for her next album, on which she wants to be more experimental, while still rooted in rock. She cites PJ Harvey as an artist who’s released successful but “weirder, progressively” indie-rock albums over the course of her career. “I wanna just play around with different structures and stuff like that,” she says.
She’s also taking note of who she believes to be stellar vocalists. “I feel like there’s a lot of artists right now that are really good live,” she says. “That’s the thing I’m looking at in other artists who are ahead of me or further along in their career.” She mentions Ethel Cain and Willow in particular, whose Coachella performances she keeps seeing clips of online. She also mentions a superstar she has been inspired by since she was a kid: Miley Cyrus. “I love her,” says Blondshell. “I was just watching videos of her singing yesterday and it takes so much work to sound that good and to be that consistent.”
The Piece of Advice Every New Indie Artist Needs to Hear
“While you’re in the process of making the music, don’t think about how you’re gonna put it out. Don’t bring the business parts of it into the actual writing. I would say leave those elements – and also leave your expectations about whether or not people will connect to it – outside.”
The Indie Artist/Band You’re Currently Obsessed With
“I like Wednesday a lot. Listen to ‘Formula One.’”
The Most Exciting Thing In Music Right Now
“I see a lot of singer-songwriters making indie feel more mainstream right now. And I think guitar music becoming popular again is sort of part of that. I also feel like it’s kind of like, indie sleaze is back. I think people are craving that energy. But I don’t know, I just feel like there’s more space for different kinds of music to be popular on a more mainstream level right now.
But more importantly, there being more room for other types of music than just three genres. And [knowing] your references can be very different. I think people might be surprised that I absolutely love Miley Cyrus. There’s a lot of very indie artists who love her. I saw her on the street once, I had my sister’s dog and she said, ‘Can I say “hi” to the dog?’ And I was like, ‘You’re Miley Cyrus.’ I was with my family and my dad was like, ‘Who is that? You’re blushing.’ I was like, ‘Are you f–king serious? It’s Miley Cyrus, and yeah, I’m blushing. You don’t have to call me out.’ It was kind of iconic of him, actually.”
The Album
Rat Saw God, out 4/7 on Dead Oceans.
The Origin
As a kid growing up in Greensboro, N.C., Karly Hartzman “always wanted to be in a band, but wasn’t,” she tells Billboard. By “going to every show I could and photographing shows and making zines,” she eventually landed in a pop-punk band in high school – “just kind of noodling around” on a microKORG synthesizer – before taking up songwriting and performing in earnest as a student at University of North Carolina Asheville in the mid-’10s. After buying her friend’s guitar in junior year, Hartzman “just kind of fucked around until I made a sound that sounded good,” she says. “I taught myself on a combination of watching live videos of other bands on YouTube and learning covers. I still haven’t had a lesson really – so I’m just kind of flying by the seat of my pants.”
Hartzman conceived alt-country project Wednesday in 2017, subsequently turning to peers in Asheville’s robust indie circuit to make it a proper band. The following year’s self-released yep definitely served as a test run, before the band — by then comprised of Hartzman, Xandy Chelmis (lap steel), Alan Miller (drums), Margo Schultz (bass) and Daniel Gorham (guitar), released I Was Trying to Describe You to Someone (“our first album, like with a label that we were excited about”) on Orindal in February 2020.
“The first time we felt validly like, ‘We’re doing music, this is a record we have on vinyl’ was right before the pandemic,” Hartzman says. “Our release show got canceled because of the pandemic. And then we weren’t playing any shows, [so we] had no idea how people felt about the album.”
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The Sound
Wednesday fuses traditional alt-rock hooks with enveloping shoegaze and country twang for music that’s both familiar and singular, and Hartzman’s evocative, specific songwriting draws on great country music storytellers – Drive-By Truckers, Lucinda Williams, “a lot of the outlaw country people” – who she credits for producing “some of the most amazing lyricism in the world.” Hartzman spent her North Carolina youth “hearing country songwriters ambiently kind of against your will, whether you liked it or not,” and spent years keeping the music at arm’s length due to its conservative cultural connotations. But she reconsidered her stance after discovering artists, like the Truckers, who “[embodied] the fact that you can enjoy country music and promote social justice.”
In 2022, Wednesday released a covers album, Moving the Leaves Instead of Piling ‘Em Up, that epitomized the band’s diverse interests, with songs by country legends (Gary Stewart, Roger Miller), alt-country greats (Vic Chesnutt, Drive-By Truckers), The Smashing Pumpkins, and contemporary Brooklyn DIY upstarts Hotline TNT. “We take all of the genres we do have influence from very seriously, and we have a deep love and appreciate for all of that music,” says Hartzman, describing the set as “less of us trying to replicate a sound and more us trying to do justice to where we’re from and how it influenced our taste.”
Another key element: Chelmis’ lap steel work, which took on a distinct character after he accidentally routed it through a distortion pedal and liked the sound. “He’s really revolutionizing that instrument,” Hartzman says. “When you tour with an instrument that is not just a regular guitar, I think it is really engaging, because it brings some of the magic back into music. Not knowing how something works as an audience member is one of the most fun experiences you can have — watching someone who has mastered this mysterious thing.”
The Breakthrough
With the pandemic raging in 2020, and little bearing on how much IWTTDYTS was or wasn’t catching on with audiences, Wednesday scored discounted studio time in Asheville and recorded Twin Plagues, which it released in August 2021. (Gorham departed Wednesday before the sessions and was replaced by Jake Lenderman.) When touring restarted and the band hit the road in support of the record, it was shocked by the way positive internet buzz had grown its real-life audiences. “We were like, ‘What the hell? When did this happen?’” Hartzman recalls. “It was very zero to 100 … very surreal. It felt like it didn’t happen fast, because it was years of standing still with the pandemic — but if you put the show before the pandemic next to a show after the pandemic, it’s a huge jump.”
The attention attracted more than just fans: Soon, Wednesday signed with Dead Oceans, the prominent indie label that has in recent years helped catapult Phoebe Bridgers, Mitski and Japanese Breakfast to stardom. (With a laugh, Hartzman describes Dead Oceans as “our Harvard, our reach label. I was like, ‘There is no f—king way.’”) The band returned to Asheville and holed up in a “fancy-schmancy studio” to record its Dead Oceans debut.
The resulting album, Rat Saw God, expands Twin Plagues’ rootsy scuzz to epic proportions; Wednesday announced their Dead Oceans signing to the public with the release of the set’s lead single “Bull Believer,” a blistering, eight-and-a-half-minute opus that covers lyrical ground from Spanish bullfighting to Mortal Kombat before dissolving into squalls of distortion and Hartzman’s shrieks. But otherwise, Rat Saw God finds strength in concision, as sturdy hooks score Hartzman’s vivid and often unsettling verses, where characters might doze off watching Formula One racing, get their stomach pumped after tripping too hard on Benadryl, or overdose in a Planet Fitness parking lot.
While Rat Saw God is sonic step forward for the band, it’s an even bigger advancement for Hartzman’s personal, detailed lyricism, which shines throughout. Take brief and breezy album closer “TV in the Gas Pump” (out today), something of a travelogue documenting a recent two-week Wednesday tour.
“The lyrics for that one were collected in a phone note,” Hartzman says. “Anytime I would see something out the van window or we had an experience that stuck with me, I would write it down.” At one gig, Chelmis took more mushrooms than he planned for a microdose, and found himself overwhelmed in a dollar store across the street from the venue – forever immortalized in the song’s final verse as “Violently came up/ In a Dollar General/ You took too much.”
The Future
As the latest standard-bearers of North Carolina’s prolific indie-rock scene – embodied by revered Durham-based label Merge, and artists including Superchunk, Polvo and Archers of Loaf – Wednesday wants to help their talented peers get their due. Last fall, the band took Raleigh shredders Truth Club on tour as support, and one of Asheville’s most promising young artists lives within Wednesday’s ranks: Lenderman, Hartzman’s partner and Wednesday’s guitarist, released his acclaimed album Boat Songs as MJ Lenderman in April 2022. “I like the fact that we’re kind of coming up together,” says Hartzman, who frequently plays in Lenderman’s band on his solo tours. “It’s very exciting and fun.”
Hartzman’s excited to see how fans receive Wednesday’s new material live once they’ve had time to digest it, and she emphasizes how invigorating life on the road is for her creatively. That said, she cherishes returning home to North Carolina. “I’m glad I live out of the way, where people don’t really give a f—k about indie music a lot of the time,” she says. “My life at home will stay really normal, and then I can have my Hannah Montana moment on tour, and then come home and, like, be a person.”
The Piece of Equipment You Couldn’t Live Without
“I have like a ’90s Rat distortion pedal – I use that and a tuner on stage.”
The Artist You Believe Deserves More Attention
“Honestly, I feel like it’s time for Unwound to get their flowers, especially because they’re playing again [on a just-concluded reunion tour]. I feel like I don’t see people talking about them and how influential and how much their sound has affected a lot of [artists], especially Philly shoegaze sounds. I’m an Unwound head. It’s one of my favorite bands.”
The Piece of Advice Every New Indie Artist Needs to Hear
“Don’t think about the audience that is going to hear your song when you’re writing and just think about what you want to say.”
The Thing That Needs to Change in the Music Industry
“Oh lord. Everything? I think the first thing needs to be we need to change the way we pay opening bands. It’s really unsustainable for a band, especially if it’s a band in a van that’s trying to catch up with a band on a tour bus. It’s a really unsustainable practice.”
The Thing They Hope Fans Take Away From Their Album
“I just hope they hear this one and trust that I’m gonna keep making music. We’re signed to a bigger label and I think the sellout mentality, it scares a lot of people — but I feel like we are on a mission to stay very true to ourselves. I want them to trust that I’m going to keep doing whatever the f—k I want with my songs.”
The Project
I Love You Jennifer B, out now on Rough Trade Records.
The Origin
Though they were both drawn to the Guildhall School of Music in London for its rare, genre-inclusive approach to music academics – teaching everything from electronic production to jazz piano – Georgia Ellery and Taylor Skye were not the most likely duo at the school to form a band. Ellery arrived her first year at the school as a violinist with no experience writing songs, while Skye was busy scoring scenes in feature films. “But I think we were both looking for each other,” Ellery says wistfully, looking back on the time she still says is “definitely the most formative of my life.”
Inspired by the emerging experimentalist pop scene at the school, Ellery tried to write songs on her own, setting down her trusty violin in favor of a piano or guitar. After penning her first one, Ellery took it to Skye to produce, given her admiration for his soundtrack work and their shared love of James Blake, Four Tet and of Annie Mac’s BBC 1 radio show. “I’ve never really enjoyed playing by myself, so it just made a lot of sense to work together,” Ellery explains. “He was looking for a band, I was looking for a band, so the two just kept going after the first song.”
Soon, the duo was self-releasing their music, which ultimately sounded as jarring as the name they assumed to do it: Jockstrap. When asked why they chose the moniker, Skye just shrugs. “We like heavy metal names.”
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The Sound
Made up of Ellery’s soul-baring songwriting and Skye’s bombastic electronic production, Jockstrap’s I Love You Jennifer B is a commanding front-to-back listen, and is already beloved by tastemakers like Jamie xx and Populous. At times, I Love You Jennifer B is longing, and at other times frenetic, but that’s what makes it brilliant: it is committed to subverting expectations at every turn.
Skye says it was always a conscious choice to put together a full project’s worth of songs, but Ellery also says, “We weren’t writing for cohesion.”
The Breakthrough
When releasing their first songs, Jockstrap took inspiration – knowingly or unknowingly – from Skye’s early-Uni roots, scoring scenes in his dorm room. The duo paired their music with visuals they created themselves; sure, saving the money as a then-independent band was helpful, but making music videos from scratch was also a way to illustrate a bigger artistic vision.
“We had this sort of plan of how we should self-release,” says Ellery of their first songs. The band put out homemade videos as well as linked up with a local magazine to premiere them. “We were just so driven and determined to make it a real thing,” says Ellery. “I think we did it the correct way, because our team just kind of came to us after.” The music videos and songs led to their record deal with Rough Trade Records, two EPs and finally, their debut album.
The Piece of Studio Equipment Jockstrap Cannot Live Without
Skye: “My PSP vintage warmer.”
Ellery: “My trusty old Audio Technica headphones that are dirt cheap.”
The Artist They Believe Deserves More Attention
Skye: “MT Hadley”
The Takeaway That They Hope Fans Have When They Hear the Album
Ellery: “We truly hope that there’s a banger in there for everyone. That at least one song screams at them.”
The Advice Every Indie Artist Needs to Hear
Ellery: “Take control and make your own music video. Try to get your own premieres in magazines, don’t wait on others to do it.”
The Thing That Needs to Change in the Music Industry
Ellery: “More women. Less misogyny.”
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