Penelope Road

Arcy Drive

With time to kill and an attic to jam in, Arcy Drive, a group of four good buds from Northport, New York began forming their scratchy but spirited sound.Traveling in a 1989 Toyota van, they shared their music locally which they coined "Attic-Rock." After a summer in their hometown and new found passion of playing live, the four renovated an old school bus and began touring the US before their first official release. Many dive bars and music halls later, their "Barefoot Tour" landed the band a new cult following.This year, the group released two singles amassing over 1 million streams in less than their first two months. They are back soon to release their first official project, "Attic Sessions." This is a soulful but grungry compilation of 8 Live tracks recorded in Los Angeles on the tail end of their tour. Arcy Drive is ready more now than ever to get back on the road for another exciting year!-Nick, Pat, Brooke, Austin

Petey USA

American Aquarium

American AquariumThings Change In the lush tobacco fields of North Carolina where BJ Barham was raised, people work hard. Families stay nearby, toiling and growing together. BJ loves those farms and his tiny Reidsville hometown, but he had to run off and start American Aquarium, a band now beloved by thousands. BJ couldn’t stay. But he couldn’t really leave, either: he’s still singing about the lessons, stories, and lives that define rural America––and him. “I moved to the big city to go to college and fell in love with music,” BJ says. “But half the songs on our record are about small towns––little pieces of my childhood. I’ve had moments where it turns out a piece of broken English my father repeated twice a week is the most accurate way to say something. So I put it in a song.” American Aquarium’s seventh studio album Things Change offers the band’s finest collection of folk-infused Southern rock-and-roll to date. Stacked with BJ’s signature storytelling––always deeply personal but also instantly relatable––the record questions and curses current events, shares one man’s intimate evolution, and leaves listeners with a priceless gift: hope. “In my early 20s, I was not as hopeful,” BJ says. “Now, as I’m getting ready to become a father, I think I have to be hopeful––especially with the situation our country is in now. For her sake, I have to be positive.” He pauses. “Her” is his daughter, due in the spring of 2018. BJ adds, “Being self-aware has always been a blessing and a curse. But that’s what’s always made my songwriting relatable to people. I don’t hold back. I’m almost too honest.” BJ’s candor has fueled American Aquarium’s runaway appeal, visible most clearly in consistently sold-out shows across the country and throughout Europe – between 200 and 250 dates a year. Much has changed for the band and BJ since their acclaimed last effort, Wolves. In 2017, every American Aquarium member save BJ quit the group. American Aquarium has featured about 30 players since BJ founded the outfit in 2006, and while each member has left indelible marks, the band has always been anchored by the literary songs and sometimes roaring, sometimes whispering, drawl of BJ Barham. BJ’s personal life also underwent seismic shifts: He got sober. He got married. Soon, he’ll be a dad. Featuring a new band lineup that includes Shane Boeker on lead guitar, drummer Joey Bybee, bassist Ben Hussey, and Adam Kurtz on pedal steel and electric guitar, as well as a reinvigorated frontman in BJ, Things Change is American Aquarium’s first release on a label after selling thousands of records on their own. “As an artist, your goal is for the newest thing you do to be better than the last. You’re slowly whittling away the bullshit to try and get to the truth,” BJ says. “With this album, I learned how to cut some of that fat so that it’s just truth. It’s our best record.” Recorded at 3CG Records in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Things Change was produced by Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter John Fulbright and features cameos from Americana standouts including John Moreland and Jamie Lin Wilson. Brazen album opener “The World is on Fire” is a richly layered rock-and-roll anthem that documents BJ and his wife’s stunned reaction to the last presidential election. Emotional and conversational, the song taps into widespread feelings of confusion and fear: “She said, ‘What are we going to do? What’s this world coming to?’ / For the first time in my whole life, I stood there speechless.” But what begins as despair builds into defiant faith, as BJ growls a call to action to cap off one of his favorite songs he’s ever written. “I’m complaining about the state of things, and then the third verse almost serves as a challenge to myself: hey, you’re in charge of another human being. You can create change,” he says. Driving rock-and-roller “Crooked + Straight” explores the small-town consequences of questioning religion, and the tightness of family in the face of one member’s rejection. His father’s advice anchors the song. “I come from a blue-collar family. I’m the only one who didn’t go into farming. I learned if you want something, you have to go out and take it. You can’t expect anything from anybody,” BJ says. “You can only go out there and work harder. My dad always said you can outwork anybody else.” Love for hard work and the people who carry it out appears repeatedly throughout Things Change. Guitar-heavy “Tough Folks” is a snarling ode to those with dirt under their fingernails, while bass- and pedal-steel-infused “Work Conquers All” spins a tale in praise and pursuit of Oklahoma’s state motto. The album’s love songs are the kind of achingly beautiful that only comes with maturity and a willingness to expose one’s own flaws. Haunting “Shadows of You” recalls a lover’s flight as the protagonist longs for what he let get away. Gorgeous “Till the Final Curtain Falls” celebrates loyalty and pledges endless devotion. The moving title track takes an often doleful topic––people’s tendency to change––and turns it on its head, tracing BJ’s personal growth and recognizing his now-wife’s steadfast love. BJ’s other two favorite tracks are album standouts. Moving “When We Were Younger Men” addresses the break-up of American Aquarium head on. As BJ professes love for his former bandmates over stripped down acoustic guitar, his voice is honeyed and deep. “It’s an open letter to five guys who I spent eight years of my life with seeing the entire world,” BJ says. “I think anyone who has ever had to walk away from a friendship or has had somebody walk away from them will relate to the song.” Stunner “One Day at a Time” is self-perceptive and vulnerable, detailing BJ’s battles with himself. Even within his career full of well-written gems, the song is a towering accomplishment. “At the end of the day, if you’re not writing songs to affect other people’s lives, you’re in it for the wrong reasons,” BJ says, reflecting on the new album, where he’s been, and where American Aquarium is headed. “Money may come and go. You may never get fame. But if you sit down and write songs to affect people, you can do it your whole life and be happy.”

Ethan Regan

Music goes beyond skin deep for Ethan Regan. Piercing the surface, he’s not just singing and playing guitar; he’s laying his emotions bare, getting out those words that we don’t always say when we should, and practicing the best kind of therapy—out loud. As a vocalist, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and producer, the North Carolina native shapes each facet of his artistry, architecting soundscapes, performing every part, and belting right from the soul. Sonically, he fuses gentle, yet heartfelt folk with alternative experimentation, going as far as to pull inspiration from rock, hip-hop, and funk. Born in Raleigh, his family settled in Charlotte by the time he turned five-years-old. Even though mom and dad encouraged him to learn guitar with lessons, his interest in the instrument waivered until he stumbled upon a YouTube clip of Damien Rice at a festival. During freshman year of high school, Ethan learned how to produce on Ableton and started to drop D.I.Y. projects. Attending Penn State for college, he constantly posted music on TikTok. Eventually, “Durham” incited a viral frenzy. Its popularity crossed over to DSPs, amassing several million Spotify streams at the start. Meanwhile, “My Fault” and “Secrecy” sparked the same result and saw streams grow rapidly. Simultaneously, he progressed into a formidable performer on stage galvanized by hundreds of shows and dates with everyone from Rainbow Kitten Surprise to Chelsea Cutler and Jeremy Zucker. Building on this foundation, he packed houses on his first headline run in 2025. Once again, Ethan connects at a core level through a series of singles for Columbia Records and more to come.  

Sir Chloe

One line on the record: I am the Dog is a record of exquisite contrast: fast, feverish, and dreamy all at once. I am the Dog is invested in constructing exquisite and impossible tensions, interrogatory and profound.   Dana Foote put Sir Chloe together in college to serve as her senior thesis. She wrote “Michelle,” and “Animal,” songs that would become the band’s first major hits a few years later, on the floor of her college dorm. The band recorded the songs in the early hours of the morning, the only time their school’s studio was available. The rest of Sir Chloe’s EP Party Favors was recorded in a warehouse that the band transformed into a decent recording space with just $100 dollars and sheer will. This labor of love soon transformed into something colossal. Due to the success of the EP, Sir Chloe would go on to tour with Portugal. the Man and alt-J, open for the Pixies, and headline two tours in the United States and Europe.   When Sir Chloe wasn’t touring, Foote worked with Grammy award-winning producer John Congelton to make what would become Sir Chloe’s debut album: I am the Dog. She wrote with pop powerhouse Teddy Geiger and Sarah Tudzin, from illuminati hotties. Collaborating with a team supported and challenged Foote, and the resulting work is a more stylistically dynamic and mature song cycle. I am the Dog is a record that grapples with finding control in the entropic chaos that is nature, that is life: “The violence of the natural world is pretty constant throughout the record,” says Foote, “It’s about trying to find control within that violence.” It’s a record invested in constructing exquisite and impossible tensions, toying with opposition, resolving it, and then destabilizing any comfortable resolution once again. Foote is not as invested in being at rest so much as she’s interested in interrogating why she cannot be.   Single “Hooves,” is an urgent song, fast and intense. It’s campy and serious at the same time. Foote was thinking about the particular physical freakishness of goats: their three eyelids, how their eyes move independently from each other, that these bizarre features better equip them to avoid predators. Characteristic of Foote’s songwriting, “Hooves” embodies paradox to get its point across: sonically it’s deliciously perverted and dark, while lyrically it demands space, expresses a unequivocal bid to be left alone: “I don’t want to hold hands,” Foote sings over the violent thrash of guitar, “You’ve been chewing my hair over and over again.” It bursts open, erupts, leaves both nothing and everything to the imagination. Foote’s voice is emotional and dynamic. Her alto is vibrant, intense, sometimes frightening. Lyrically, she’s frank, but avoids giving too much away. Foote is always toeing the line between expression and concealment. She makes a fetish of the unsaid, preferring to shield her songwriting with a degree of opacity. I am the Dog opens with “Should I,” written with Sir Chloe’s guitarist Teddy O’Mara and Teddy Geiger. It’s severe, dissonant. Foote asks a naughty question, explores a back and forth, oscillates between “Yes” and “No”. Foote is always wondering which way to go. “Know Better,” orbits a similar tension. “I wanted it to sound like I was teasing someone,” says Foote. Like when you pull someone’s hair instead of asking for a kiss. It’s disarming, at the same time molten and edgy, obscuring and revealing desire in the same breath. It’s the outline of someone’s tongue against the inside of their cheek, suppressing the smile that would reveal the secret they’re looking to keep. “Salivate,” born out of Foote’s meditation on the way shame is leveraged to control people, shapes desire into something dark: a scream and a whine and a weapon. The album’s title track begins stripped down and melancholy, almost resigned, and then slowly builds into a cathedral of sound, cinematic and heartbreaking. It’s written from the perspective of a beloved but violent dog Foote lived with. She empathizes with the animal, recognizing the tragedy of its helplessness, entirely at the mercy of the person it can’t help but hurt: “I am the dog under your couch, gnashing teeth and open mouth,” Foote sings, “Shouldn’t have clawed my own way out, loving you is my only house.”   I am the Dog is a record of exquisite contrast: it points the finger, it pushes away, it beckons, it empathizes, it condemns, it yells and laments and prays. It’s fast and feverish and also shimmering and dreamy. It’s lush and textural and profound. I am the Dog interrogates ugly and painful things and pulls them apart until they surrender answers that are complex, or reveal the foolishness of seeking an explanation in the first place

Anamanaguchi

We are Anamanaguchi. We make hyper-active, hyper-positive 8-bit jams that epicly wail with guitars and drums.

Destroyer

What is a “boogie”? In the common tongue, it’s a dance or an occasion to dance, a song or a shindig, an incitement to move, quickly, whether it’s on the floor or out of town, getting down or lying low. This being a Destroyer album and not the common tongue, the implications of a title like Dan’s Boogie are at once more alluring and dangerous. “A boogie is a hustle, a scam that doesn’t quite work, the moves we make when we’re up against it,” explains Dan Bejar. “I think of spy work, double agents, sleeping with one eye open, an eye on the exits. But I also think of petty street-level victories and losses and improv.” Dan’s Boogie is a breakthrough album for Destroyer, both in the sense that it makes moves that no Destroyer album to this point has made, and in the sense that, to record it, Bejar had to burst through a series of intentional and unintentional barriers to write the songs. Initially challenging himself to not write songs so the ideas would well up inside of him until they breached containment, the months following the completion of LABYRINTHITIS turned into one year then two, at which point Bejar gave himself a New Year’s resolution to play the piano every day for an hour. That lasted about four days, but the songs Bejar credits as coming from that resolution—“Cataract Time,” “Hydroplaning Off the Edge of the World,” “Bologna,” and “Dan’s Boogie” among them—are all-timer Destroyer songs across the vast spectrum Bejar and his collaborators have established for themselves: spectacle-laden pop epics, personal piano ballads, and smouldering works of mood that blur the lines between song and novel and cinema, each brimming with the urgency of a state secret in the mind of a tortured spy.  Lead single “Bologna” is the most radical frame for this energy, as it’s the first time Bejar wrote a song where he imagined himself as a supporting character. Taking lead is Fiver’s Simone Schmidt, whose voice—tough and expressive, piercing through the murk of the scene—is a siren’s call that haunts the album. The gravity of their voice pulls Dan’s Boogie into order around a sense of impending doom, the way a fatale’s promise of the unusual and the ecstatic dooms the principal character of an erotic thriller.   “Hydroplaning Off the Edge of the World” is a delicious bit of contradiction, a peppy song that came out of the havoc Bejar was intentionally wreaking on himself—its holiday cheeriness making the angst of its lyrics go down smoothly until the song veers off the road. “We are now entering a new phase,” Bejar intones, introducing layers of guitar and synthesizer that considerably darken the palette as he alternates between singing and speaking. The lyrics and vocals are improvised, invented as Bejar recorded the demo in his garage—a manic stream-of-consciousness and simultaneously exquisite display of his songwriting mastery. Contradiction informs much of Dan’s Boogie, the fog swirling around Bejar illuminated by the friction between competing truths and tastes, as when his interest in jazzy ballads runs aground on producer and bassist John Collins’ interest in bands like Led Zeppelin and Scritti Politti. When Bejar told Collins that he was thinking of Sammy Davis Jr., the title track bloomed into being, Bejar adopting a Rat Pack swagger with almost delusional glee against a dreamy soundscape of soaring guitars, lush horns, jazz drumming, spaced-out synths, and, perhaps truest to how Bejar sees himself, plinking lounge piano.   In terms of shaping sound, the centerpiece of Dan’s Boogie may be “Cataract Time,” an eight-minute epic that ranks as some of the heaviest lyrics Bejar has ever written, and one of Destroyer’s most musically intricate compositions. Borne aloft on an easygoing groove, Bejar’s lyrics—“a reckoning, a dressing down” as he describes them—are transfigured, their melancholy tasting almost counterintuitively like hope. It’s an intimate song that puts away Destroyer’s usual urban fable milieu in exchange for bracing interiority, but its lilting groove can see a future, one that Bejar and his band are eager to meet. It is, to use Bejar’s phrase, the kind of song you make when you’re up against it, when it seems as if the world is crashing down upon you. And therein lies the album’s most radical shift: Where previous Destroyer albums were locked in combat with the world, Dan’s Boogie dances with it, its nine reveries coalescing into one long hustle. Dan Bejar’s eye may be on the exits, but he’s not leaving anytime soon.

Sam Burchfield and The Scoundrels (Rescheduled from 4/3)

Sam Burchfield was raised in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains of South Carolina, where he learned to play and learned to write. His youth was steeped in the mossy creeks and deep ravines of those ancient woods, and they imbued him with the gift of song. Now in his thirties, Burchfield raises a small family in the North Georgia mountains and continues to find inspiration in the rivers and ridges of Southern Appalachia.   His latest album ‘Me & My Religion’ was produced with his touring band, The Scoundrels. It is the first collaboration for the group after years of paying dues to the highway. Colin Agnew (drums), Trygve Myers (bass), and Ryan Plumley (guitar) accompanied Burchfield to Muscle Shoals, Alabama along with Nashville producer, Rachael Moore, to record the album of 7 days.   This 10 track album is almost equal parts Americana, psychedelia, indie folk, and Southern rock. All these flavors combine to support the album’s main theme. As seasoned listeners will expect, Burchfield’s lyrics are far from on the nose, as the declarative title would suggest. 'Me & My Religion' is an exploration of mankind’s toil for meaning in a world of vapid consumerism and commercialism - one in which we have become deaf to our own harmony with nature. Despite the weight of these ideas, the album feels like a lighthearted sojourn through the backwoods of our imagination.

Adam Melchor

Adam Melchor’s journey thus far has been far from conventional. Long story short, this proud Jersey boy picked up a guitar and eventually fulfilled his lifelong dream of becoming a musician in Los Angeles. But in reality, he got there by singing for mobsters “well-suited insurance guys” at pizza parlors, getting an Opera degree, playing thousands of hours in various dives, churches, and restaurants (sometimes in the same day), and driving across the country to the West Coast in an old Toyota Camry (twice). Moving to Los Angeles during 2018, he had sessions with everyone from Charlie Puth to The Chainsmokers, and has also toured alongside Mt. Joy, Dodie, Rodrigo Y Gabriela, and JS Ondara. Picking up steam, his single “Real Estate” gained impressive traction leading up to the 2020 SUMMER CAMP EP. After racking up more than 40 million streams and garnering acclaim from NPR, Wonderland Magazine, Billboard, Atwood Magazine, and more, he properly made his debut earlier this year with Melchor Lullaby Hotline, Vol. 1.