Cavemen "Smash (Fortune Tellers)"
From Fortune Tellers Records:
Since Caveman began in 2010, they’ve released 3 full records, toured endlessly(sharingstages with The War on Drugs, Jeff Tweedy, and Weezer, and playing festivals including Coachella, Bonnaroo and Austin City Limits), receiving accolades from Pitchfork to the New York Times. Now in 2021, they’ve become one of the mainstays of the NYC music world. More than anything, Caveman are the band that everyone seems to know, who always seemed to be out on the town for years if you needed someone to meet up with late into the night, the throughline to a dozen disparate crowds of artists. Led by Matthew Iwanusa, lifelong city resident, with guitarist Jimmy Carbonetti (who grew up on Roosevelt Island) they quickly started their first band in high school. At 18, they met Jeff Berrall (bass) to complete the trio. Nowadays, they’ve grown from young punk kids into statesmen of sorts for NYC indie music. Jimmy’s Brooklyn shop The Guitar Shop NYC is a city institution and a clubhouse for the band. Practicing and working out of Williamsburg nightclub Baby’s Alright during it’s down hours, the band are just beginning to recreate the momentum of their early career after a period of false starts, legal issues and delays that slowed the release of their new record for several years.
Graduating Life "II (Pure Noise)"
From Pure Noise Records:
It’s a good thing that Bart Thompson doesn’t believe in fate. If he did, he might have followed the signs that the universe was giving him and not made this second Graduating Life full-length. Not only was the first tour for this once-but-no-longer solo project cancelled midway through because of the coronavirus outbreak, but Thompson didn’t have a particularly enjoyable time recording it. Most artists would shy away from being so candid about the negative aspects, but Thompson isn’t most artists.
“The recording process wasn’t that fun,” he admits. “There were moments that were, but I had this falling out with the friend who was tracking us. We’re fine now, but it kind of made me realize that I just I don’t fucking care about that shit. It ruins it for me, in a way. Then when that tour, which was first tour I was able to do with Grad Life, was cancelled, it was almost like if there’s a God, it’s pretty obvious that I’m not supposed to fucking do this! It really bummed me out.”
Zanzo "Musk EP (Internet and Weed)"
L'Orange & Namir Blade "Imaginary Everything (Mello Music)"
From Mello Music:
Namir Blade controls the clouds and the concrete. With the blink of a synapse, his imagination conjures elaborate visions of valleys of death, bad Tijuana dreams, and shotgun raids. In the next breath, he’s blowing off texts, rolling out of bed around noon, and crooning falsetto pleas about his willingness to change. The Nashville’s latest, Imaginary Everything is a work of teleportation and twisted fantasy, a wig-flipping blast of surrealism and slang editorials. It is a journey and experience. A collaboration with the otherworldly producer, L’Orange.
Most artists favor either hyper-realism or wild futurism, but Blade artfully splits the difference. Blurring the lines between fact and fiction, he offers an artistic conceit and nocturnal panoramas. He reverently communes with the older gods, but also blasts listeners with the jarring experiences of modernity. Scope the seance for Hendrix jamming “Foxy Lady” at 4 a.m. on the last morning of Woodstock, the acid in the headband. Blade channels the boiling revenge funk of James Brown’s “The Big Payback.” But he simultaneously shares a kinship with the most lyrical and raw of the contemporary underground. You can hear it viscerally in Blade’s bars and from guest incantations from Quelle Chris and Fly Anakin. Imaginary Everything is a startling arsenal, a departure from convention, toggling between interior flights of mind and guillotine chops to the neck.