Notable Releases of the Week (5/23)

Memorial Day Weekend and the unofficial start of summer are here… hopefully those belated April showers in the Northeast clear up soon! Sometimes holiday weekends mean less new albums, but this is a pretty stacked week, including at least one album that was written with grilling in mind. So fire up the Memorial Day BBQ and check out the five new albums I review below.

Bill tackles more in Indie Basement, including Stereolab, Sparks, Robert Forster (The Go-Betweens), These New Puritans, Moontype, Sophia Kennedy, Lindstrøm, Lou Tides, and Marc Ribot. This week’s honorable mentions include Boldy James & Your Boy Posca, Thalia Zedek Band, Smerz, Chepang, Bad Beat, Pachyman, Pan Amsterdam (aka Leroy Thomas) , Midnight, Cola Boyy, Age of Apocalypse, …And Oceans, Taj Mahal & Keb’ Mo’, Resavoir & Matt Gold, Witchcraft, Emptyset, Kuru, Gabito Ballesteros, Dollar Store (Crimpshrine, Fifteen), You Vandal, Andy Frasco & The U.N., BED, Sports Team, Fredo Bang, Rob49, DJ.Fresh and The Musalini, G-Eazy, Clara Joy, CDSM, Dirty Nice, Quinie, Sedona, When Rivers Meet, The Northern Territories, Odoacer, Senna, Louise, The SteelDrivers, Skunk Anansie, Howard Jones, Joe Jonas, the Agonize (ex-Vatican) EP, the Nymphlord EP, the Julia Michaels EP, the VC Pines EP, the Evan Bartels EP, the Revival Season EP, the Reyna Tropical remix EP, the live Earth album, the live Year Of No Light album, the live Squirrel Flower album, the instrumental Alchemist album, the deluxe edition of Green Day’s newest album Saviors, the reissue & Ian MacKaye remix of 7Seconds New Wind, and the reissue of Cindytalk’s 1984 debut album Camouflage Heart.

Read on for my picks. What’s your favorite release of the week?

Home Is Where – Hunting Season (Wax Bodega)
The third album from the most trailblazing band in emo’s fifth wave mixes country and punk as only this band could.

In her own words, Bea MacDonald wanted to make a record “that you could grill to but also cry to… not cry, just feel something.” As a band who adopted the “fifth wave emo” categorization early on, Home Is Where are part of a scene that’s full of great crying/feeling-something records, but emo grilling records? Those are harder to come by. Enter: Hunting Season. As everyone from Beyoncé to Lana Del Rey to Post Malone to Julien Baker have been finding ways to embrace country music, Home Is Where found comfort in fellow Florida-born artist Gram Parsons and his band The Flying Burrito Brothers while they were out on tour and missing their swampy hometown (a town that Bea and guitarist Tilley Komorny no longer live in due to Florida’s treatment of trans people). As Bea puts it, Parsons “mixed country rock and roll, which is what we were doing–we wanted to mix punk and country and all kinds of different stuff and have it be poetry.”

For the most part, Hunting Season is a full-blown alt-country album, an album that probably wouldn’t get referred to as “emo” at all–save for the Midwest-y riffs and screamo parts of “Artificial Grass”–if not for Home Is Where’s roots in the scene. It’s heavy on strummy acoustic guitars, Dylanesque harmonica, soaring pedal steel and dobro (by Dan Potthast of Jeff Rosenstock’s band and MU330), earthy vocal harmonies (from Bea and awakebutstillinbed‘s Shannon Taylor), and some countrified piano (by Evan Bailey). Lyrically, it’s filled with vivid images of rural America, cut with rose-colored nostalgia for places and times that suck more than your memories of them do. Bea’s half-yelled vocal delivery reflects the band’s punk-informed DNA, and the harder stuff shines through in other ways too, like with the high-octane riffs of “Bike Week” (which Tilley says were inspired by Lonesome Crowded West-era Modest Mouse) and the noise freakout at the end of the 10-minute “Roll Tide.” From where I’m standing, Hunting Season looks like fifth wave emo’s answer to Meat Puppets II; it’s a swampy, noisy, country/punk crossover that suits today’s DIY scene in the same delightfully strange way that that album suited the SST era. And as that band have done for their entire career, I expect Hunting Season is gonna confound some listeners. Even in a time when artists are going country left and right, Home Is Where’s oddball approach to the genre is like pretty much nothing else.

hunting season by Home Is Where

Florry – Sounds Like…Florry! (Dear Life)
The Northeast alt-country band plug in for a louder, jammier, electrified followup to their 2023 breakthrough ‘The Holey Bible.’

While Florry’s 2023 album The Holey Bible literally sounded like people sitting around a campfire and singing folk and country songs together, its followup Sounds Like…Florry! sounds like that same band plugging in and stepping out on a stage. Right from its jammy, guitar-solos-fueled, nearly-seven-minute opener “First It Was A Movie, Then It was A Book,” Sounds Like… is fueled by echoes of the Grateful Dead and the Allman Brothers at their twangiest, with a dash of Dinosaur Jr-style sludge. If that formula also sounds a little bit like MJ Lenderman & the Wind, it might not surprise you to learn that this Philly/Vermont-based band made the album with The Wind’s Colin Miller in Asheville at the MJ Lenderman/Wednesday crew’s go-to studio Drop of Sun, and they also finished writing it across three days at the now-defunct Haw Creek compound where Miller, Lenderman, Wednesday’s Karly Hartzman, and others once lived. This louder, more electrified version of Florry still manages to keep the shambolic charm of their last album intact, and the harder exterior is matched by their best songwriting yet. Florry came a long way in the last two years, having logged tours with veteran jam-friendly indie folkies like Kurt Vile and Real Estate, and it sounds to me like they’ve taken all that growth and funneled it into Sounds Like…Florry!.

Sounds Like… by Florry

MSPAINT – No Separation EP (Convulse)
With help from two members of Show Me The Body, the Hattiesburg, MS synthpunk trailblazers explore new ground on this EP.

The best EPs are so often the ones where you can hear a transition in the making, not just leftovers from the previous EP or a stop-gap release between albums but instead a brief release that covers bold new ground. MSPAINT’s No Separation is one of those EPs. It follows the band’s excellent 2023 debut album Post-American–a synthpunk album that goes as hard as the hardcore bands MSPAINT often tours with, without using a single guitar–and it suggests a handful of different directions that MSPAINT’s eventual sophomore album could take. Produced with Show Me the Body’s Julian Cashwan Pratt and Harlan Steed, No Separation is both poppier and more experimental than its predecessor. It embraces slower tempos and trippy left-turns, and vocalist Deedee balances out his trademark shouts with softer singing and vocal effects that help take MSPAINT into dizzying new territories. It feels more “synth” and less “punk” than Post-American, and that’s not a bad thing. MSPAINT already came off as a deeply unique band on Post-American and No Separation only sounds even more like a band in a lane of its own.

No Separation by MSPAINT

Charmer – Downpour (Counter Intuitive)
The third album from Charmer takes a big creative leap towards the melodic, melodramatic sounds of early 2000s emo/post-hardcore.

In the five years since Charmer’s 2020 sophomore album Ivy, a pandemic forced the world into lockdown, Charmer’s former label No Sleep shuttered, three of the four band members became parents, and two of them joined Liquid Mike’s band. And on top of all that, Charmer were writing more music than ever. Not all of it fit on their new album Downpour, hence the somber, atmospheric detour they took with 2023’s Seney Stretch EP, and the 11 songs that do make up Downpour are their strongest yet. The creative leap they took between their rickety, Midwest emo-y self-titled debut EP and the cool indie-emo of Ivy is doubled by the leap they’ve taken between Ivy and Downpour, making the five-year wait feel totally worth it. On Downpour, Charmer go all in on the kind of melodic, melodramatic emo/post-hardcore that you would’ve found on Drive-Thru and Victory Records circa 2001-2004, and they made it with a producer who knows a thing or two about that era: The Movielife/I Am The Avalanche drummer Brett Romnes (whose recent production work also includes Anxious, Hot Mulligan, and Free Throw). Specifically, they remind me of the moment when emo bands were starting to taste the possibility of real-deal fame, but emo was still an underground phenomenon. It was a brief but special moment when bands were still playing basements and VFW halls but writing songs that were ready to be sung along to by exponentially bigger crowds. It’s an exciting sort of moment that really doesn’t come around very often, and I don’t know if the current music biz will afford Charmer the same type of exposure that those Victory/Drive-Thru bands got back in the day, but I do know that they’re tapping into that spirit in a way that very few other bands are right now.

Downpour by Charmer

HiTech – Honeypaqq Vol. 1 (Loma Vista)
The Detroit ghettotech revivalists’ three recent banger singles and 10 other songs make up this campy, fun mixtape.

In case playing a booty like bongos in the “SPANK!” video didn’t make it clear, Detroit’s HiTech not an overly-serious bunch, but they do take goofy fun very seriously. The rapper-producer trio have become the leading torch-carriers for their hometown-bred genre ghettotech, a style of music informed by house, techno, and Miami bass that Detroit helped bring to the world in the ’90s. It became less omnipresent over the years, but it never left the hearts of Detroit’s own, and now HiTech are putting a new spin on it and bringing it to new audiences all around the world, from Coachella to overseas. They’re kinda doing for ghettotech what recent tourmate Nia Archives is doing for jungle, reinvigorating a style of ’90s dance music without ever sounding beholden to the past. On this new mixtape, they’ve got “SPANK!” and their other instantly-satisfying recent singles “TAKE YO PANTIES OFF” (ft. George Riley) and “SHADOWREALM” (ft. Zelooperz) joined by 10 other tracks (with appearances by Debby Friday, Rob Apollo, Na-kel Smith, Lovefoxy, and more) that are just as campy and fun. The trio told The FADER that a proper album is still on the way, but in the meantime, this mixtape already has the heft of one.

HONEYPAQQ Vol. 1 by HiTech

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Read Indie Basement for more new album reviews, including Stereolab, Sparks, Robert Forster (The Go-Betweens), These New Puritans, Moontype, Sophia Kennedy, Lindstrøm, Lou Tides, and Marc Ribot.

Looking for more recent releases? Browse the Notable Releases archive.

Looking for a podcast to listen to? Check out our new episode with Pelican about 11 albums that influenced their new album Flickering Resonance.

Pick up the BrooklynVegan x Alexisonfire special edition 80-page magazine, which tells the career-spanning story of Alexisonfire and comes on its own or paired with our new exclusive AOF box set and/or individual reissues, in the BV shop. Also pick up the new Glassjaw box set & book, created in part with BrooklynVegan, and browse the BrooklynVegan shop for more exclusive vinyl.

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