Browse: Vinyl

K/S/R

Already In Heaven

Gilgongo

***K/S/R (Ben Kujawski, Abigail Smith & Justin Rhody) have been performing and recording together since 2022. Recorded by the band themselves during a full week of day-long sessions—violin, percussion, lap steel, accordion, flute, guitar, harmonica, and rhodes piano were each stretched, damaged & made to sing through various extended techniques. The trio's non-concentric approach to collective improvisation mirrors the dark harmonic density and symbiotic formal structures of the cosmos. Industrial work zones are also a major inspiration. K/S/R are the co-founders No Name Cinema (an underground microcinema in Santa Fe New Mexico). The trio has previously performed and/or lectured at ATA Gallery (San Francisco), Highlands University (Las Vegas), University of New Mexico (Albuquerque), Shapeshifters (Oakland), the Firehouse (Joshua Tree), and the Light Matter Experimental Festival (Alfred University, NY). Their music has been featured on the legendary Coast to Coast AM radio program and experimental/jazz-focused community radio shows across three continents. The group will be touring in Northeast and Southwest USA (November 2025) and in the UK (England & Scotland), April 2026. Already In Heaven will be followed by a split LP with Nihilist Spasm Band (also co-released by Physical & Gilgongo Records) in March 2026. Edition of 100 copies.

Smegma

Folklore & Concepts

Gilgongo

***A new LP from Smegma (now in their 52nd year!)—featuring Ju Suk Reet Meate, Oblivia, Ace Farren Ford, Dennis Duck, Aaron Dilloway, John Wiese, Tom Recchion, Rick Potts and more. The record celebrates the inevitable portions of joyous cacophony from the modern era of the group (circa 2008 - 2024), while also including a piece dating clear back to November 1973, from the day the group landed on the name Smegma. Incorporating imagery from their 2023 induction to the Oregon Music Hall of Fame and a cover drawing from Ju Suk, the record also features a variety of collages from Ace (who unfortunately passed away in December 2023), throughout the layout itself but also with the inclusion of a unique xerox of collage work in each copy of the record.

Sobbing Honey & Anna Homler

s/t

Gilgongo

***LA musique concreté / drone duo Sobbing Honey (Grant Capes & Mike Meanstreetz) meet Anna Homler—a serial collaborator who’s eclectic and playful contribution to experimental music can be, in recorded form, traced back at a fever pitch to her 1985 LP with Steve Moshier, Breadwoman (reissued by Rvng Intl. In 2016). Recorded one fine day at Seahorse Sound, the trio launched into a shifting weave of feral chants, haunting dirges, and clattering percussion. Synth pads and skewed tape loops led by Homler’s unearthly voice merge to sounds fit for lovers of both organic and electronic music.

Dlina Volny

In Between

Italians Do It Better

***The latest from this darkwave / post-punk trio from Minsk, Belarus. Dlina Volny’s music vaporizes on the event horizon where Eastern European Post-Punk collides with Western Synthwave. The album balances mystical narratives & dreamlike fantasies sourced deep in the trio’s subconscious. Walking the tightrope that separates pain & euphoria, the lyrics wrestle with polarity. Anxiety vs passion, & hope vs the deep despair that surrounds negative space.

Davidson, Ethan Daniel

Lear

Blue Arrow

Ethan Daniel Davidson’s second record of 2025 deepens the allegorical and reflective songcraft that he established on Cordelia earlier this year. Lear is a rich, legs-stretched companion to its counterpart where Davidson draws from his life’s experiences like water from a freshly tapped well. Lear’s eight songs possess a distinct ache akin to Neil Young’s On the Beach. Every lyric, a new road to be explored, and Davidson, the perfect guide to the journey. Davidson’s fourteenth studio album emerged from the same sessions that birthed Cordelia, in similar fashion to alt-country legends Lambchop’s 2004 sister albums Aw C’mon and You C’Mon. He’s accompanied by the same crackerjack team: producers David Katznelson and Luther Dickinson, bassist and Emmylou Harris collaborator Byron House, drummer Marco Giovino (Robert Plant, John Cale), and pedal steel legend Rayfield “Ray Ray” Holloman. At first blush, these tunes might appear more deceptively upbeat than the ruminations on Cordelia, but fear not—Davidson is still mining the dark corners of his own psyche to great aplomb. “It’s me trying to figure out what's happening inside of myself,” he explains, while reflecting on the lyrical headspace he inhabits throughout Lear. “I'm a positive person, but this is a part of my own psychological healing process, which we should all engage in. We're all wounded people, in some kind of way—and I've figured out how to confront that through music and storytelling.” Sometimes, that means confronting his own catalog, as “Count the Knives” revisits the original’s easy-shaking arrangement as captured on...

Nilsson, Molly

Amateur

Night School / Dark Skies Association

Amateur is the 12th studio album by Molly Nilsson. Deep in the teeth of a career that threatens to tip into something resembling a “legacy,” Nilsson celebrates with an album recorded instinctively, quickly and bursting with so many moments of emotional brilliance and clarity it may be her greatest yet. Hers has been a career spent reaching out, perennially powerful in her earnestness, a warrior ridiculously defenceless and armed with a glittering sincerity. Shearing herself of the machinations of the music industry, recording at home, writing direct to the heart.Amateur is a jubilee for losers. A treatise in thirteen songs, it states clearly that one should live their life with eternal curiosity, offering one an open hand of comradeship out of the rat race. The songs on the album are both some of the most personal of Nilsson’s career and the most anthemic. First single “How Much Is The World” asks to re-evaluate value in the face of a neoliberal system squeezing the life out of love. Pulsing opener “Die Cry Lie” satirizes the commercialisation of emotion in the form of a shout-along diss-track. With a pounding rhythm track held down by gorgeous chord changes, heartbreaker “Valhalla” carries the torch for the main themes of the album: never growing up, making mistakes with kindness, moving on.There are moments on Amateur shrouded in reverb, slightly out of focus, forcing the listener to step deeper into the Mollyverse. Nilsson’s open-armed beseeching to the world permeates every beat, every chord. These are songs...

Gnomes, The

s/t

Dog Meat Records

Introducing the Bayside Beat of The Gnomes!Although they emerged from Melbourne bayside outer suburbs onto the local live scene with their fresh and spirited indie-rock update of the garage-beat sounds of The Easybeats, Kinks and early Beatles only a year or so ago, Gnome actually started out as a bedroom solo project for teenaged singer/songwriter/ guitarist Jay Millar a few years back. Jay, playing everything himself, started recording and releasing a steady succession of material—quite a few albums' worth—on his own Goblin Records label via Bandcamp. Realizing he needed a band to start playing out, Jay approached some like minded players from Frankston's rehearsal hub Singing Bird, and with Jay on lead vocals and lead guitar, Ned Capp on guitar, Olly Katsianis on bass, and Ethan Robins on drums, Gnome became a band.Early in 2025, the last solo Jay recordings released under the Gnome name caused something of an international underground sensation when the Bandcamp only I Like It EP—four songs of kranked up Kinks-style mono riffage—was posted by a Spanish garage-punk YouTube page and quickly clocked up over 50,000 views.At the same time, the band quickly began gaining attention on the thriving Frankston scene and around Melbourne. They started breaking out, sharing bills with the likes of Drunk Mums, Skegss, Split System, The Prize, The Unknowns, Cosmic Psychos, Hockey Dad, Guitar Wolf, The 5.6.7.8's, The Breadmakers, Loose Lips, fellow Frankstoners/Singing Bird alumni The Belair Lip Bombs, and, on a quick trip to Sydney, Cammy Cautious & The Wrestlers.And now,...

Lyons, Chris

Painters Street

Nudie Records

***Painters Street from Chris Lyons (Silver Synthetic) is a groovy meditation on transition and growth, an honest, earnest, warm and wistful dive into the deep. Whirling wurlitzer and gentle harmonies gather together with easy rolling rhythms and intimate words, a trip through a sweet hazy listening experience over 70s AM Gold. About the record, Chris says “The sound was really a result of our limitations. 16 tracks. 1 inch tape. Whole band crammed in a tiny room. Lots of bleed. Limitations are your guide! Clearly there are overdubs, but the majority of this record was cut live. I like records where the room is a sound that you hear. It feels more like you're in it. You are there. It feels human. Unpolished, imperfect, and graceful.”

Donnelly, Stella

Love and Fortune

Dot Dash

Stella Donnelly returns with a deeply personal and anchored album, a body of work that traces the journey back to herself after a period of profound change. Recorded in Naarm/Melbourne, the album carries the grounding energy of place, offering a sonic landscape that feels both intimate and expansive. Joining Donnelly on the record are longtime collaborators and friends Marcel Tussie, Sophie Ozard, Julia Wallace, Timothy Harvey, and Ellie Mason, whose playing brings a looseness and vitality to the music, holding space for Donnelly’s voice to shine in its most tender and unguarded forms.

Stark, Susannah

Minor Gestures

Night School / Stroom

Drifting in on a stream of birdsong, synths and field recordings of rivers, Susannah Stark posits questions from the outset of Minor Gestures, her second studio album. Sung in both Gàidhlig and English, Stark is in constant dialogue with her surroundings, with history, mythology and with the listener on her second album for cult label Stroom of Brussels and Glasgow’s Night School. Recorded with an ensemble curated from the worlds of experimental and folkloric music in her adopted city, Minor Gestures is an omni-directional conversation, open-ended and infused with curiosity and sensitivity. Using primarily acoustic instruments and folk modalities, the songs here display an almost preternatural confidence as Stark shifts perspectives and narratives throughout. Minor Gestures is a body of work that celebrates standing in vulnerability and cultivating resistance to the onset of the corporatisation of daily life. Stark’s duo-linguistic approach feels like a love letter both to the Gàidhlig language and term for translation: eadar-theangachadh, 'inter-tonguing' itself as a creative act. Much of the album was composed from visual cues, and experimenting with the fundamentals of existing in bodies, in this time and place: breath, drone, whisper, song, and primal rhythms inhabiting the unknown space of the mouth. These practices suffuse Minor Gestures with a physicality and immediacy that feel akin to practice of zen meditation: in an age of constant distraction and speed, perhaps truly living, with all its corporeality and massiveness is a form of resistance? A leap forward from the more electronic and solitary practice of...

Wesleys, The

Explosive Device

Meritorio

***Since 2022, The Wesleys have been delivering the kind of unapologetic, “straight to the heart” rock ’n’ roll that sticks with you. Their songs channel love, heartache, anxiety, and all the sharp turns life throws your way. Wrapped in unforgettable hooks and melodies that linger long after the last chord rings out. Hailing from Montreal, Henry Girard, William D'Amours, Quentin Chisholm, and Pablo Garcia pull from garage, jangle, pop, and punk, but never stay in one lane. Their new release, Explosive Device, pushes their sound forward with fresh tones, new textures, and the same raw energy that’s become their calling card. Featuring four dynamic new tracks with Girard, Chisholm, and Garcia each taking turns at the mic, Explosive Device captures the band at their most collaborative and adventurous. Recorded in Montreal with Monty (Pre-Occupations) and mixed by Adrian Popovich (Tricky Woo, American Lips, Physical Congas), the EP shows the band in full command of their craft. The vinyl edition of Explosive Device comes paired with Outside Voices (2022), marking the first-ever physical release of The Wesleys debut EP. Together, these records tell the story of where the band started and where they’re charging full speed ahead. Pressed on transparent green vinyl.

Hot Load

Fate Unknown

Going Underground

***Los Angeles' Hot Load delivers their first long awaited full length. 11 tracks of raging Punker Music drawing magic aura from Poison Idea's Feel The Darkness, Discharge. A metal tinge—but from a Japanese Punk angle so it's not overboard. Limited Pressing of only 500 copies.“Local heroes HOT LOAD don't disappoint with this ripping debut. Fans of RAW POWER, ENGLISH DOGS, POISON IDEA and even old school metal like TANK will probably dig this. but really those are just references, HOT LOAD is doing their own thing and it rules.”—Jesse Michael (Operation Ivy)

Great Lakes

Don't Swim Too Close

HHBTM

***Great Lakes’ Ben Crum returns with a fantastic new album, Don’t Swim Too Close. Over 25 years and eight records, Crum has built a reputation for sharp songwriting and interesting stylistic shifts. Don’t Swim Too Close is no exception, as Crum draws from a classic rock tradition, echoing both the Americana spirit of Neil Young and The Band and the proto-indie rock of Television and the Velvet Underground.Immediately accessible, its songs land with the ease of lived-in classics. Themes of empathy and regret, mental health struggles, disillusionment, and the lone journey of the writer weave through the record. But this isn’t a bleak listen. Crum’s dry, gallow's humor bubbles up throughout, balancing heaviness with wit. The characters in Crum’s songs are soul-searching, making for a compelling and thought-provoking listen.Don’t Swim Too Close is that rare record that blends superb lyrics with the subtle smoke of melody, and delivers it all in an instantly enjoyable format.

Hurley, Michael

First Songs

Mississippi

***MICHAEL HURLEY is one of the most beloved cult figures of the Greenwich Village folk scene and his songs have been recorded by everyone from the Holy Modal Rounders and the Youngbloods, to Vetiver and Cat Power. First Songs, recorded in 1964 when Hurley was only 22 years old, shows that his charming, bumming, hippie, wino persona was fully formed at an early age. The album features the first recorded versions of such Snock classics as "The Werewolf Song" and "Captain Kidd." 

Cosmic Tones Research Trio

Cosmic Tones Research Trio

Mississippi

***New album of peaceful explorations by The Cosmic Tones Research Trio. This, their second record, maintains the space and long tones that made their debut, "All Is Sound" a successful anecdote to the loud and fast times we live in. It also expands their musical palate with powerful rhythmic elements. The Cosmic Tones Research Trio have been breaking new ground with healing / meditation music that also honors their roots in Gospel and Blues... and hints at forward looking Spiritual Jazz. Through their Cello, Saxophone, Piano and Flute playing they bring a new sound to the table. Ancient to the future.

The John-Pauls

Eep Eep EP

Aagoo

***Following the success of their debut EP and two full-length LPs for New Jersey-based Aagoo Records, the John-Pauls are back with a new 7-song EP titled Eep Eep. Recorded mostly live in Lockhart, Texas, by Matt Gerhard and Knife in the Water’s Aaron Blount, the songs exhibit the full range of the John-Pauls’ post-indie-parent-rock. “Florescent Brown” is ‘80s poetry wave, like riding a 99 Luftballoon to Athens, GA, piloted by Johnny Marr and the Edge. “Hold Me Tight” is an xx-esque interplay of naked guitars and Mikila John-Paul’s damaged chanteuse vocals. “Eep Eep,” the single, is a bubble gum punk POV monologue of a libidinous and articulate dolphin, the Plastic Bertrand Band circa a minute before tomorrow. “Islands in a Ditch” sounds nothing like Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton, but everything like overhearing a conversation between Lou Reed and Edna St. Vincent Millay at the HEB. “Ugly Feelings” is affect theory put into practice, as if sung by Mark E Smith backed by Robert Fripp. Beneath it all, Elizabeth John–Paul’s Ringo-in-front-of-the-beat drumming keeps the mood urgent, beyond present. The ep closes with Neu/Unrest inspired experimentation and never ends.

Granicus

S/t

Riding Easy

GRANICUS transcends the genre of early ‘70s progressive hard rock, they will thrill somebody hungry for a killer in that department but are so creatively explosive anybody into any brand of hard rock from classic, metal, punk, prog up into the wild beyond will get caught up in the band’s whirlpool of manic energy. You get to relax here and there but most of the time they come at you so decisively you gotta hang on to your brain. For my money these guys delivered an LP on level with the best famous bands of the day, contemporaries like Led Zep, Rush, Deep Purple, Sabbath... based on the power and variety captured here it is clearly only a lack of promotion that kept Granicus off the charts. It has hard prog moves in spades but also over the top energy with outrageous vocal moves powerful enough to have scored a big bullseye in teenage wasteland America 1973.As the liner notes on the sleeve declare... “Granicus puts forward a musically cohesive, emotionally compelling vision of growing up wasted in America, searching desperately for and occasionally glimpsing spiritual truth, in a climate foreshadowing Armageddon”. Granicus is named after a battle in 334 BC where Alexander The Great defeated the Persian Empire. This album has more than enough ammo to defeat your head right now, they take you deep down into the sordid demonic underbelly of America 1973, ending the LP with an ultimate rock and roll exorcism. Appropriate to say fasten your...

Sarid, Loris S.

Ambient $

Moon Glyph

***Mythology has a recurring theme: creating ambiguity by rearranging worlds and creatures that normally don’t belong together. Centaurs, Minotaurs, Hydras and so on: mockery and mystery intertwine into entities that are in equal parts magnificent and ridiculous. Referencing this idea in the present, Loris S. Sarid conjures 12 compositions simultaneously showing traits of dreamlike trap, candy-flavoured New Age and Spoken Word. The lines between spiritual and mundane, drama and parody are bent and questioned, used as raw material and treated with the same importance. Binding the work together is the sense of feeling peacefully lost inside a shuffling iPod, buried in a quiet zen garden inside a noisy shopping mall or vice versa. What connects Ambient music, which often anonymously swims into endless sleeping playlists with monthly subscriptions to well-being, to the mainstream output of commercial music? Ambient $ doesn’t explore the social aspect of this question, but rather celebrates the beauty of its paradoxes. This album is the morning choir of forgotten NFTs, brewing lyrics in their binary exile. The television homily of a wrestler turned priest, turned influencer chef, then hermit and then rapper. Randomness is reclaimed as a human quality, and the aesthetics of mass music consumption are repurposed into a rather inexpensive guide to streaming-service-enlightenment.

Goatpenis

Anesthetic Vapor

Nuclear War Now

***Through its output over the past twenty-five years, Goatpenis has rightfully earned its reputation as one of the most venerable black metal bands in existence. Hailing from the Santa Catalina region of southern Brazil, and following a relatively brief stint as the death metal act, Suppurated Fetus, this cult resumed its homeland’s legacy of bestiality first established by Sarcófago, the band’s ancestral compatriots from the Minas Gerais region to the north, with its earliest demos, htaeD no tabbaS, Blessed by War, and Jesus Coward, in the early 1990s. After a period of several years of lineup changes and intermittent hiatuses, Goatpenis redefined its sound and aesthetic with the release of its debut full-length, Inhumanization, in 2004, and the band subsequently released four more albums over the next decade and a half.Beginning most obviously with the 1993 demo, Blessed by War, and continuing on through to its newest, sixth album, Anesthetic Vapor, hereby fittingly offered under the auspices of Nuclear War Now!, Goatpenis has championed the inevitable reality of human self-annihilation, thus earning its place among the few atop the mantle of black war metal. Whereas the term “war metal” is often used as a misnomer in reference to any generic bestial black metal band, Goatpenis is one among a scarce number of acts who actually embody the spirit of the label in all aspects of the music’s thematic content, songwriting, and execution.

Invunche

II

Nuclear War Now

***+ANCESTRAL BLACK METAL+ Remastered reissue of debut full-length by Dutch-Chilean band INVUNCHE. Featuring the original cover art and never before released lyrics. II is inspired by Ildjarn, Dawn of Humans and Bone Awl, channeling vile black metal punk into two seamless psychedelic.

Siege Column

Sulphur Omega

Nuclear War Now

***The return of darkness and ugly metal. Not for fans of Opeth.

Cusumano, Joel

Waxworld

Dandy Boy

***Fiery debut power pop LP from a Bay Area underground mainstay! Though you, dear reader, may not know it, Joel Cusumano has played a huge role in the Bay Area underground scene for years—as songwriter and/or lead guitarist in a wide-ranging lineup of bands such as Sob Stories, R.E. Seraphin, and Body Double. Cusumano began writing the music that would become his first solo album, Waxworld, after a stint in a mental hospital treating his debilitating OCD: “It was bleak. For a year I could barely function, barely leave the house. After [the hospital] I recovered pretty rapidly. But instead of feeling relief, there was dread, like, ‘Well, what now’? You spend over a year falling off the deep end and you’re a different person when you hit the ground … I needed to write differently than I had before. I was looking around the world and not recognizing what I saw. The songs had to reflect that alienation. I was done with the ‘angry young man’ jilted lover stuff I’d been doing in Sob Stories. I was bored with that kind of boilerplate rock’n’roll topography.” A painful breakup at the end of writing process further sharpened Cusumano’s eye towards material reflecting his growing unease in a world in unrelenting flux. But despite weighty origins, Waxworld sound is, like all of Cusumano’s work, instantly fun, catchy, and accessible, if a little moody. Waxworld effortlessly weaves between guitar pop styles from bubblegum (“Push Push”) and post-punk (“Death-Wax Girl”), to straight power...

Goods, The

Don't Spoil the Fun

Dandy Boy

***Oakland power pop outfit The Goods arrive with their long-awaited full-length, Don’t Spoil the Fun. Recalling the jangle and melodicism of early luminaries like The Byrds and Big Star, with the punch and verve of 90s torchbearers like Teenage Fanclub and Matthew Sweet, The Goods adapt the hallmarks of the genre into a fresh and effervescent cocktail that sparkles with sincerity. Reverent of their influences but with a sound unmistakably their own, on Don’t Spoil the Fun The Goods fulfill the promise of contemporary power pop with grace and panache.Produced by songwriter Rob Good (also of indie pop darlings Ryli) in his own Oakland studio, the album’s 11 songs positively leap from the grooves, putting Good’s penchant for tight, clever songwriting and big melodic hooks on full display. The LP marks a great leap forward from the band’s debut EP, eschewing much of that disc’s punkish grit in favor of a sunny technicolor jangle, without sacrificing an ounce of their trademark energy. Joined by bassist Cherron Arens and guitarist Gabriel Monnot, Don’t Spoil the Fun finds The Goods embracing a fully-realized panoramic pop sound, where electric guitar arpeggios ring and vocal harmonies soar atop a bed of sprightly strummed acoustic guitars and bouncing basslines. The arrangements are snappy and assured, and earworms abound.

Cindy Lee

Malenkost

W.25TH

Cindy Lee is the brainchild of singer/guitarist Patrick Flegel. While some may know Flegel from his time spent in Canadian experimental indie band Women, Cindy Lee has spent the past four years crafting songs that push and pull in opposing directions – from tales of tragedy laced with haywire distortion to moments of breathtaking beauty. On Malenkost, Flegel combines everything that makes Cindy Lee so essential: heart-wrenching romantic pleas, rough shards of noise and twilit ballads. Featuring the lo-fi pop single “A Message From The Aching Sky,” Malenkost sounds like Deerhunter playing The Supremes or vice versa. Superior Viaduct’s imprint W.25TH presents the first of many Cindy Lee releases. Spectral and timeless, the music of Cindy Lee is hauntingly familiar yet of another plane, a magical collision of Brill Building hooks and uncompromising No Wave. “Cindy Lee is intensely dark and cathartic, an eerie fever dream of fleeting, utterly heartbreaking classic girl-group melodies … one of the best things we have heard all year.” —Gorilla Vs. Bear

Cindy Lee

Act of Tenderness

W.25TH

Cindy Lee is the diva alter-ego of singer / guitarist Patrick Flegel, the one-time captain of heralded Canadian experimental guitar pop act, Women. In Flegel’s working on / as Cindy Lee exclusively over recent years, their songwriting makes a move toward high atmospherics, often achieving a mysterious sweetness rooted equally in beauty and ache.As Cindy Lee’s third long-form statement, Act Of Tenderness makes use of antipodal themes to create a living sound: static with grace, distortion and sugar, all masterfully arranged with crooked nods toward pop classicism. The layered vocal on “Power And Possession” creates a palpable haunt, bringing historical girl-group lament to choir-esque heights. The feedback shriek and industrial grind of “Bonsai Garden” provides near-operatic damage, yet never stumbles into the irrevocably grave. These snowy pieces give the album a decidedly cinematic feel, albeit one bent more towards Eraserhead.Originally released in a scant private edition in 2015, Superior Viaduct’s imprint W.25TH is pleased to give Act Of Tenderness its deserving wide release.

Cindy Lee

Model Express

W.25TH

BACK IN PRINT - PRICE INCREASE - Cindy Lee, the performance and songwriting vehicle of Canadian artist Patrick Flegel (who fronted influential indie group Women earlier), previously stunned listeners with Act Of Tenderness, a heart-wrenching statement informed by the noirish core of celebrity, and has continued to enchant with every album, including the startling What’s Tonight To Eternity released earlier this year.Model Express originally appeared as a self-released edition of 100 gold cassettes. The arch, filmic drama of Cindy Lee’s songwriting—realized with keyboards, guitars, aching voice and collaged, lo-fi production—traverses a wide range of emotional and sonic terrain. The red velvet psych-pop of “What Can I Do” gives way to the fluid “Diamond Ring” like radio bursts from space. Model Express finds Flegel at both their most experimental and immediately melodic, and this first-time vinyl release recognizes the collected tracks as a pillar in the Cindy Lee catalogue. Cindy Lee (who uses the gender neutral pronoun they) is a drag persona drawing on suburban closet queens and mid-century divas. In keeping with Flegel’s interest in the faultlines of identity, gender expression, performance and media, Model Express delivers an intense and diverse set of unforgettable songs.

Cindy Lee

Cat O' Nine Tails

W.25TH

Originally released as an edition of 50 lathe-cut LPs housed in silk-screened jackets in 2020 (fast on the heels of What's Tonight To Eternity), Cat O' Nine Tails has long intrigued die-hard Cindy Lee fans with its combination of the classic songwriting that would dominate Diamond Jubilee a few years later and an actual suite of classical songs under the title itself.Opening with the gothic soap opera theme of "Our Lady Of Sorrows" into the manic exploration of "Cat O' Nine Tails," onto the dusty western walk through Patrick Flegel's lovely guitar work on "Faith Restored," the album seems to soundtrack the coolest movie the late '60s ever produced. All of this builds to the lush and sweeping ballad of bruised hearts that introduces that beautiful voice via "Love Remains."Side Two sees 2024 live show closer "Cat O' Nine Tails III" complete the suite to epic effect, before introducing the absolute showstopper that is "I Don't Want To Fall In Love Again." It is tender and fragile in that way that only Flegel can make both familiar and unique. Closing with the ethereal soul shuffle stomp of "Bondage Of The Mind," the album showcases nine songs from an essential time in the Cindy Lee evolution.W.25TH / Superior Viaduct is proud to bring this collection to the larger audience it deserves.

Candy

Sweet Treats

Projectile Platters

***Complete collection of unreleased and demo material from this mega obscure New York power pop/new wave outfit circa 1980. Candy boldly declared "one taste and you're hooked!" and nowhere is that more true than their instantly infectious power pop masterpiece "My Kind;" it's a perfect slice of Cars / 20/20 / Real Kids style new wave snap, but the group took a variety of stylistic jabs, as evidenced by this collection. Open this box of sweets and you'll find Sparks style quirk, hardcore Devo skronk, and even some KBD brashness. Candy may never have gone past the local club circuit, or even committed their songs to wax in their time, but the quality of their songs and playing is nevertheless documented in full on this album.

Phipps Pt.

Songs We No Longer Sing

Seeland

Phipps Pt. is the duo of Lovage Sharrock and Jon Leidecker (Wobbly, Negativland, Thurston Moore Group). Falling somewhere between precise songcraft and free improvisation, acid folk and ambient electronics, the music Sharrock and Leidecker create is an ongoing conversation between two singular artists and longtime friends listening and responding to one another with care and curiosity. Songs We No Longer Sing—the duo’s second studio album—is a song cycle which moves across vignettes of consumption, lust, grief, and what it takes to push through life at a moment when so many forces are marshalled against living. Sharrock’s gossamer vocals and delicately finger-picked guitar find their complement in Leidecker’s careful approach to processing both, so that input frequently becomes indistinguishable from output. The album’s electronic glitches, buzzes, whirrs, and drones burnish rather than obscure Sharrock’s plaintive melodies and imagistic lyrics. Phipps Pt. work their sonic material into a final composition whose design, no matter how abstract, never erases the traces of the human hands behind it. Sharrock often says at the start of a performance that Phipps Pt. is “an idea and a place that we are going to together.” Full of strange beauty and unexpected emotional candor, Songs We No Longer Sing issues a similarly generous invitation to the listener to partake in many return visits.

Bilders

Neverlasting

Grapefruit / Carbon

Bilders new album, Neverlasting is a mix of psychic adventures, hard psychedelia and commentary with a bite. Bilders have always sung outliers with a heap of empathy—exploitation of migrants, unmitigated killing and the state of our depleted planet. This album maintains an analog feel with technical finesse as it casts a cold eye on uses and abuses of power in the higher echelons. It is pure Bilders. Surprise collaborations bring in fresh tangents of colour and emotional edge. “We are the Neverlasting renter-squatters of Earth exhausted”.The band is once again the voice/guitar of Bill Direen, bass of Matt Swanson and near everything else by Alex McManus, with guesting by former Bilders. It’s the same lineup as last year’s acclaimed Dustbin of Empathy, released by Grapefruit and Sophomore Lounge, and the first ‘core’ Bilders lineup to remain constant for more than one album. The new compatibility shows. It’s an album that builds on current strengths.Notable guestings include Athens Georgia lights Claire Horne of 1980s BBQ Killers, and Curtiss Pernice, guitarist of heavy vanguard Porn Orchard, with a snook-in from experimental and electronic prince Todd Gerber. Two never-released tunes by vintage Bilders (Stu Page and Greig Bainbridge) sit perfectly with the new material. This is quite simply the strongest Bilders album ever.

One Of Nine

Dawn Of The Iron Shadow

Profound Lore

North Carolina’s One Of Nine play JRR Tolkien inspired majestic black metal and are the most prominent Tolkien / Lord Of The Rings black metal band since the legendary Summoning. Their sophomore album Dawn Of The Iron Shadow (out through Profound Lore Records) follows their 2023 debut Eternal Sorcery which laid the foundation for One Of Nine trodding their way to the forefront of the new breed of US black metal. With Dawn Of The Iron Shadow (which is graced by cover art courtesy of legendary Tolkien artist Ted Nasmith), One Of Nine elevate their black metal sorcery to a more epic and glorious plateau—one that is more expanded in its vision of grandeur and scope through its symphonic and grandiloquent magnificence.

Guided By Voices

Thick Rich And Delicious

GBV Inc

Robert Pollard: “I’m a student of hooks. That perfect combination of a lyric and a chord pattern that gives you that chill up the back of your spine.”Thick Rich And Delicious overflows with hooks. It plays through front-to-back like a power pop classic, but don’t misconstrue pop for soft. The basic tracks were cut live and hot to tape and are presented with minimal overdubs. The band recorded in a Brooklyn studio at extreme volumes, conjuring the spontaneity and electric energy of their legendary live show. Complimenting Pollard’s lead vocals, harmonies are sung by Grammy-nominated Bobby Bare Jr and Pollard (aka “The Self-Righteous Bros”). The sound delivers on the album’s titular promise—thick, rich and delicious.Pollard combines a new batch of songs with a basket of unrecorded gems dating back to the band’s nascent years. The chorus of “Oxford Talawanda” contains a never-used hook that Pollard has been singing for nearly his entire life.With Thick Rich And Delicious, you can get that satisfaction.

Cervantes, Andres Miguel

Songs For The Seance

Speakeasy Studios SF

Andrés Miguel Cervantes brings back his Western Noir desert soundscapes with the release of his second full length album, Songs for the Seance, released on independent label Speakeasy Studios SF. Born and raised in San Diego, while calling the SF Bay area home, Cervantes' music is influenced by songwriters Leonard Cohen, Townes Van Zandt, Fred Neil, and singers Vicente “Chente” Fernandez, George Jones and Merle Haggard. Cervantes' lyrics and songcraft are distinctly his own, with beautiful haunting images of landscapes both internal and external delivered with his virtuosic folk guitar finger picking style that is as if Bert Jansch met Mississippi John Hurt on the crossroads of a dark desert road.Songs For The Seance is a meditation on the collection of memories that live inside us all, experienced, dreamed, or inherited from our ancestors. It touches on themes of identity, the need for belonging, loss, isolation, and hope. Songs that soar through haunting noir soundscapes, about communicating with our ghosts, facing what haunts us, and knowing that “there’s some winning in staying alive.”Songs For The Seance is a moving and expansive follow up to Cervantes’ debut and internationally acclaimed album The Crossing. Cervantes returns to the studio with producer Alicia Vanden Heuvel to record, once again, to Otari ½” 8 track, an analog process, with the contributions of live bandmates Jacob Aranda (pedal steel, violin), Jessie Leigh Smith (harmonica), Raphi Gottesman (drums), Alicia Vanden Heuvel (bass,vocals, percussion), Hall McCann (lead guitar, vocals), Graham Norwood (guitar), Conor Riley (piano) and Noelle...

Verity Den

wet glass

Amish

***"Amish Records is excited to announce an October 24th release date for wet glass, the stately sophomore album from Carrboro, NC-based Verity Den. This eagerly awaited new record follows their 2024 debut, which was built from early demo recordings and quickly attracted a passionate following despite the raw origins.The new album was self-recorded and self-produced over the last year and is built upon the same foundational elements as their first album, noise, texture, ambience and simple songcraft, but wet glass has a wider ranging landscape. A bigger frame brings a bigger picture, but fear not, Verity Den has not forgotten what we’ve come to love about their sound. Just because it’s groomed doesn’t mean it’s 'clear'. It’s 2025, clarity is downright embarrassing and Verity Den has expertly mastered the skill of translating the current mind-fuck zeitgeist into a sonic snapshot. They are equally inner-political journalists as they are musicians. Casey Proctor, Trevor Reece, Mike Wallace and Reed Benjamin's musical simpatico is natural.wet glass flows between multiple zones including, but not limited to, the melodic Yo La Tengo Painful era drive of 'wet glass' and 'green drag', the loopy Flying Saucer Attack haze of 'unsolved mystery' and 'highway fifty four' or the loner neo-Fred Neil devotional 'to trees'. Impressionistic lyrics, effective songs and jams that sound warm and familiar. The make-up of wet glass is dense, yet simply beautiful. Unintentionally cinematic. Verity Den conjure a sound that soaks in like an Epsom salt bath after a long day of being pummeled...

Optic Sink

Lucky Number

Feel It

***"Lucky Number, the third album from Memphis trio Optic Sink, finds the band both refining and expanding their hypnotic mix of post-punk and dance music, resulting in a sharp and moving exploration of surfaces, shadows, and self-delusion.Natalie Hoffmann (NOTS) has come into her full power as a lyricist. Her work on earlier records (see 'Modelesque' and 'Glass Blocks') shows her talent for exploring the hidden shallows of modern life, but here the funhouse mirrors are balanced by painful longing and drops of truth that leak through the cracks. The music reflects this—under Bauermeister’s driving grooves and the songs’ tight arrangements lurk hidden complexities, thanks in part to Keith Cooper’s exceptional, angular work on guitar and bass.'Unreachable / untouchable space / glass tower / a fragile face / when you’re here / where do you go?' Hoffmann sings over the sinister, nocturnal funk of 'Construction.' Few bands can match the hard beauty of Depeche Mode, New Order, and A Certain Ratio—Optic Sink manages to do more than that, adding their own sad, cutting wisdom. Produced and recorded by Caufield Schnug of Sweeping Promises, Lucky Number is out Fall 2025 on Feel It Records."—Dan Hornsby of True Green / author of Sucker and Via Negativa

Radioactivity

Time Won’t Bring Me Down

Dirtnap

Jeff Burke and Radioactivity are back! Recorded over a long period of time and released ten full years (!) after their last album (Silent Kill, 2015), here is the eagerly awaited third!Nobody was really worried about Radioactivity dropping the ball after all this time. Jeff Burke’s track record (The Marked Men, The Reds, The Potential Johns, Lost Balloons, etc etc) speaks for itself, and has for over twenty-five years at this point. It’s no exaggeration at all to say that Burke’s songwriting voice is one of the most distinctive, unique, and dare we say best of the 21st century so far. Still, Time Don’t Bring Me Down doesn’t just hold its own—it rips. With Mark Ryan (Marked Men, Mind Spiders, O-D-EX) and Daniel Fried + Gregory Rutherford (Bad Sports) in the lineup, these guys burn through eleven tracks in half an hour and leave nothing standing.The first two albums sounded like what one would expect from a Burke project—tight, fast, and pure Denton adrenaline. Time Won’t Bring Me Down still has that DNA, but this isn’t just nostalgia. Radioactivity’s got their own thing now: Burke’s hooks still bite, but there’s more space, more mood, and the band’s locked-in chemistry means every hit lands harder. One gets straight-up burners like “Time Won’t Bring Me Down” and “Why” that’ll knock the coffee out of one’s hand, but also heart-twisters like “Analog Ways,” “Ignorance Is Bliss,” and “Shell” that slow the pace down considerably, and represent real progress and evolution in style and...

V/a

Screams From The Underground

PNV

***A reissue of this cult 1992 compilation cassette marks a "passing of the torch," so to speak, from the Twisted Red Cross compilations and cassette releases of the 80's to the next wave of Filipino punk in the 90's. Featuring crucial Pinoy punk outfits Kabaong Ni Kamatayan,Psychotic Change, The Next, Askals, Bad Omen and Philippine Violators, this is an excellent snapshot of the raw hardcore punk assault brewing in the Philippines at the time. Ranging from more fuzzed out melodic styles to full throttle ultracore onslaughts, this comp will satiate all variety of noise freaks.

Demian

s/t

Riding Easy

"The Bad Seeds and Zakary Thaks were mid ‘60s Texas garage rock bands formed in the wake of the British Invasion, influenced by The Rolling Stones, Kinks, Yardbirds and others, becoming top local live attractions at a time when the 13th Floor Elevators and Moving Sidewalks were leading the way into psychedelia. In late 1966 Rod Prince on guitar and Roy Cox on bass from Bad Seeds joined up with David Fore from Zakary Thaks on drums to create a new band out of San Antonio featuring two lead guitarists. Todd Potter filled out the quartet on second guitar and they chose the name Bubble Puppy, taken from Aldous Huxley’s 1932 dystopian novel Brave New World. Huxley was an early advocate of LSD, appropriately. In 1969 Bubble Puppy scored a top 20 hit single with “Hot Smoke & Sasafrass” which led to their LP “A Gathering Of Promises”. International Artists, the legendary Texas label that previously had unleashed mind expanding classics by the Elevators, Red Crayola, Golden Dawn and others was a perfect fit. After the LP and additional 45s didn’t repeat the success of “Hot Smoke & Sasafrass” the band hooked up with Nick St. Nicholas of Steppenwolf as their new manager and moved to Los Angeles. A new band name was in order, Nick St. Nicholas chose Demian, title of the 1919 novel by Herman Hesse. His books were popular with the counterculture at the time and had provided Steppenwolf with their new name after they changed it...

Dilloway, Aaron

Medicine Stunts

Psychic Sounds

***"Long awaited release of Aaron Dilloway’s foreboding ’ambient’ works with Psychic Sounds' initial selection entitled Medicine Stunts: Two sprawling sides of atmospheric practices & mysterious meditations fully mastered and pressed on wax for the first time, all which include the glacial ‘Stunt 1’ of sparse industrial factory mesmerization invoking shadowed moments reminicent of the beloved David Lynch & Alan Splet's Eraserhead soundtrack. Dilloway's tape chops glide into glass harmonic chamber echos calling on such spirited reverberations by way of crystallophone, Aeolian harp, or even frequencies recalling Coil's experimental investigations on the legendary Soviet-era ANS photoelectric synthesizer. In this instance, a distant alien cooing along the liminal glassy seam is introduced alongside slow pumping mechanical wield, and further minimal creature calls reminiscent of the stranger field recordings documented on Folkways 'Sounds of the Sea' or Amphibian related releases.Flipside 'Stunts 2 & 3' brings the gurgling & juggling metallic slabber warbled in a box bleeding into slight fuzz unknown, all which gently wades into a pulsating pump of squells.... it all certainly stirs a flavor of your regional moldy spook house attraction soundtrack crackling through the busted sound system. If this isn't enough for the adventurous listener , a suspenseful end event on the horizon offers us an unsettling whistle in the Old West Morricone ghost town. A beautifully haunted hallway of reflected recourse through the reality of the unsettling American jokes & labyrinths of now."

Ginger Beef

s/t

Ba Da Bing!

Tijuana Taxi, Classical Gas, Soul Bossa Nova — they topped the charts over 50 years ago, but you could probably still hum these instrumental classics. With their ambitious self-titled full-length debut, Ginger Beef aims to singlehandedly breathe life back into this all-but-extinct instrumental pop genre.“If evoking emotion is the goal of music, then lyrics are cheating,”It’s a hot take from MSG (aka Warren Tse), producer and one half of Ginger Beef. His thesis for the album: “Classical and film music prove that you don’t need words to resonate with listeners and stir up feelings. Why can’t we do the same thing with pop?”In 2021, flutist Jiajia Li was asked to present a music video for the Camp Sled Island event in Calgary. She ended up collaborating with the veteran multi-instrumentalist/producer/Calgary Flames organist conveniently living under her roof (she’s married to MSG) to cook up “Flashback”, an energetic track seasoned with anachronistic synths, slap bass, and traditional Chinese elements — and no singing. Unintentionally, this one-off track whetted the crowd’s appetite, which gave Ginger Beef’s snowball a push downhill.Spurred by the warm response to their first and only song, the couple wrote new material, joined forces with heavy hitters from the local R&B and Gospel scene, and thrilled Calgary audiences with their explosive live performances. When their new fans all but demanded a recording, Li and MSG locked themselves in their basement studio and painstakingly crafted Ginger Beef’s first album. They ordered up a small run of CDs and released the...