dodie

Most adults in their mid-twenties have grown up with the internet in some way; in dodie’s case she grew up in front of it. As a teenager living in Epping - a town inEssex, dangling off the north-eastern end of London’s Central Line - dodie started up a YouTube account, and began releasing her own songs on the platform ever since.Fast-forward seven years, and she has built a dedicated following that numbers into the millions. It’s a following that has also taken her right to the Top 10 of the UKalbum charts (her last EP, ‘You’ charted at No.6). By thoroughly modern means, dodie has become one of the most successful DIY artists of recent times. Once mostcomfortable armed with a microphone and ukulele in her bedroom, releasing music on the platform that started it all, dodie’s grown to love the stage. Next year she playsLondon’s Roundhouse, which sold out five months upfront; an unprecedented achievement for an artist without a debut album to her name.Going right back to the beginning where it all began - dodie’s first upload was a song called ‘Rain’ - music has always been her first love. Raised on a soundtrack ofQueen and Electric Light Orchestra, her lunch breaks at school were jam-packed with various extracurricular clubs. “It was like, choir, the recorder, orchestra, windband, african drumming... and I went to every single one,” she remembers. “Such a music geek.” Making music always seemed like a second nature medium for chronicling her feelings. “It’s such a nice way of exploring something so complex and giant in yourmind,” she says. “Returning to it, too, and finding new meaning in it. They’re like, capsules of time. It’s like writing a diary.”“I make whatever I want, I’m making music I want to hear now,” dodie explains. “I get overwhelmed by a feeling, and it’s easy to hold onto and write around that. My songsare like an exploration of a certain feeling. Sometimes I write down phrases which people have said.... I think every songwriter’s notes app is full of shit,” she laughs.Dodie has always been a frank and honest presence online, too. As well speaking openly about everything from bisexuality to her struggles with mental health issues,her music directly addresses these same experiences. Speaking about the EP’s title track, ‘Human’, dodie points out that “when I wrote it, I thought it was a love song. This is just me talking about the excitement of getting to know someone closely. I look back and there’s so much codependency,” she says. “There’s a line in there,”she adds, quoting a lyric, “‘you’ll fit so nicely, you’ll keep me intact’. That’s not what a relationship is!” dodie says today. The very fact that she still chose to keep these lyrics intact, true to the moment that she wrote them in, says it all. In recent years, dodie has chosen to take a step back to let her art do the talking. “I loved sharing about my life, because it felt so comforting to have a place to do that,” she says. “It felt like a big old support group. Obviously the internet is complex andmessy and I think I got a bit too big, and I was sharing too much,” she freely admits. “So then I took a big step back, re-evaluated, and now I’ve created healthy boundaries, I hope. I’m human!” In this spirit, ‘Human’ is also the title of dodie’s third EP. Revisiting old songs familiar from the past - a refreshed version of ‘She’ now “soars in all the right places” - and thinking aloud when it comes to the complexities of moving forward as an artist on ‘Not What I Meant’, it’s a collection of songs that dices with staying grounded and touchable; a mile away from the polished world where she began. ‘If I’m BeingHonest’, meanwhile, captures the jolting excitement of an all-too-brief crush that unfolds over a single day. “I was told this is where I will start loving myself / Flirting's delicious; proved to be beneficial for mental health,” she quips with a typically whip-smart couplet. However, as we learn from ‘Human’ - which touches on the title-track’s hints of “codependency” through to ‘Monster’s defiance - things are rarely that simple. “I’m real, I promise,” dodie says. “Everything that I do online is real. I just want to be understood. How can I shake it into you that I am real?” ‘Human’ might just providethe answer.

Heated Rivalry — The Party

Peter McPoland

At just 20 years old, Peter McPoland creates the kind of finespun folk-pop that feels both beautifully lived-in and undeniably original. McPoland picked up guitar at the age of 14 and taught himself to play, finding lessons to be too regimented. Within a year he'd started writing his own songs, mining inspiration from folk artists like John Prine and Gregory Alan Isakov. As shown on breakout hits like his self-released single "Romeo & Juliet," the Texas-bred artist has an incredible gift for capturing the most nuanced emotional experiences, then bringing that expression to life in idiosyncratic detail.

The Floozies and Too Many Zooz

Brothers Matt and Mark Hill are the sonic visionaries behind electronic-funk powerhouse The Floozies. Certified heavyweights in the world of jam and future-groove, the Kansas City-based tandem champion authentic funk in the digital age. Familiar with sold-out shows across the country including their annual hometown Funk Street festival, prominent festival appearances at Bonnaroo, Electric Forest, High Sierra, Summercamp, Wakarusa, Camp Bisco, Summerset, Bumbershoot, and headlining Red Rocks shows, their formidable sound is continuously celebrated from coast to coast.

Hawthorne Heights

Hawthorne Heights return with their eighth studio album ‘The Rain Just Follows Me’ (Released September 2021 via Pure Noise Records). The 11 tracks on this record stand as some of JT Woodruff’s most resonant writings to date, as he unravels themes of both physical andemotional distance from his wife and daughter in Ohio, as well as personal identity as thefrontman of one of the most iconic emo acts of the new millennium. Throughout their long and storied career, Hawthorne Heights have overcome obstacles at everyturn–but these roadblocks always seemed to come from external forces, from unscrupulous record labels and the shifting whims of fickle audiences to unimaginable personal tragedy threatening to derail them .Despite the odds, the quartet composed of JT Woodruff (Vocals,Guitar), Mark McMillon(Guitar, Backing Vocals), Matt Ridenour (Bass, Backing Vocals), and Chris Popadak (Drums), have overcome it all: earning two Gold albums (2004’s The Silence In Black And White and 2006’s If Only You Were Lonely), penning some of the genre’s most well-known songs (“Ohio Is For Lovers,” “Saying Sorry”), and remaining a hard-touring act nearly two decades after forming in Dayton, Ohio.   TikTok

Jesse Welles

Jesse Welles

Michael Shannon & Jason Narducy

Lucero

Lucero has long been admired in their hometown of Memphis, where they have hosted “The Lucero Family Block Party” every spring for a number of years. At the 2018 Block Party they celebrated their 20th anniversary as a band, with the city’s Mayor Jim Strickland officially declaring it “Lucero Day.”   The group found their name in a Spanish/English dictionary. “Lucero” is variously translated as “bright star” or “morning star.” None of them can speak Spanish.   It’s been two decades since original members Ben Nichols, Brian Venable, Roy Berry, and John C. Stubblefield (keyboardist Rick Steff joined in 2006) started playing shows in Memphis. The band’s first show was April 13, 1998 at a warehouse space across the street from what is now the National Civil Rights Museum, the infamous Lorraine Motel where Martin Luther King Jr. was shot. Their first set was six songs played to about six people. On August 3, 2018, record release day for Among the Ghosts, the band will be co-headlining Red Rocks Amphitheater in Colorado.   The band’s ninth studio album, Among the Ghosts, is their first for noted Nashville indie label Thirty Tigers. It was recorded and co-produced with Grammy-winning engineer/producer and Memphis native Matt Ross-Spang (Jason Isbell, Margo Price, Drive by Truckers) at the historic Sam Phillips Recording Service, the studio built by the legendary producer after outgrowing his Memphis Recording Service/Sun Studio.   Recorded primarily live as a five-piece, Among the Ghosts eschews the Stax-inspired horns and Jerry Lee Lewis-style boogie piano featured on some of the band’s past recordings for a streamlined rock & roll sound that pays homage to their seminal influences as it seeks to push that legacy into the future. For a band who carried the torch of the alt-country movement back in the 90’s and helped pave the way for what is now called Americana, Lucero have re-discovered what inspired them in the first place. The sound is more their own and at the same time not exactly like anything they’ve done before. This is a band settling into their craft. The 10-song disc’s title is both a tribute to the spirits which roam the streets of their fabled city, as well as the hard road the determinedly independent band set out on 20 years ago. The band played around 200 shows per year for many of those 20 years.   With a nod to his younger brother Jeff Nichols, an acclaimed filmmaker whose movies include Loving, Mud, Take Shelter, Midnight Special, and Shotgun Stories; Nichols has written songs that are cinematic short stories, steeped in Southern gothic lore. There are nods to regional authors like Flannery O’Connor and Faulkner, as well as newer writers like Larry Brown (Big Bad Love, Fay), Ron Rash (The Cove, The World Made Straight), and William Gay (The Long Home).   As the first album he’s written since his marriage and the birth of his now two-year-old daughter Izzy, Nichols approached the task as a narrator rather than in first person. It’s a dark palette that includes tales of a haunting (“Among the Ghosts”), a drowning (“Bottom of the Sea), a reckoning with the devil (“Everything has Changed”), a divorce (“Always Been You”), and a shoot-out (“Cover Me”). And that’s just Side A. Side B is a letter from a battlefield (“To My Dearest Wife”), a crime (“Long Way Back Home”), a straight-out rocker (“For the Lonely Ones”) and even a spooky spoken-word cameo from actor Michael Shannon, who has appeared in every one of Nichols’ brother’s films. The song’s title “Back to the Night” references a line from Nick Tosches’ Jerry Lee Lewis biography, Hellfire. In addition, there’s a song Nichols wrote for his brother’s movie Loving, which appeared in the film and on the soundtrack, re-recorded for Among the Ghosts with the whole band.   “You could also say there’s a rescue, a getaway, a survival story and a middle finger to Satan himself,” laughs Nichols. “It’s all in your perspective.”   Several songs juxtapose going off to battle with a rock & roll band’s endless touring, shifting time periods like the spirits which haunt the album, the happiness of domestic bliss undercut with fears of loss and the specter of mortality. Among the Ghosts simultaneously reprises the past and looks to the future, while being firmly anchored in the present.   Musically, the band highlights range from co-founding member Brian Venable’s Dire Straits-meets- War on Drugs guitar pyrotechnics in “Bottom of the Sea” and “Cover Me” to the Springsteen vibe of “For the Lonely Ones”, Rick Steff’s skeletal piano lines on “Always Been You”, John C’s bass lines in “Everything Has Changed” and “Long Way Back Home”, and drummer Roy Berry’s dynamic shifts from the powerful and brutal title track “Among the Ghosts” to the marching drive of “To My Dearest Wife” and the subtlety of “Loving”. Throughout, Nichols’ bourbon-soaked growl has become even more distinctive and commanding.   Among the Ghosts offers a timeless perspective on Lucero’s distinctive sound. The lyrics could’ve been written 200 years ago or yesterday. Representing a new South compared to the one that’s been mythologized, Lucero have formulated their own ideas and culture which, in some cases, contradicts what came before them (no Confederate flags), but also updates and reconsiders those traditions in a new light.   “I think we’ve tried to remake this place that we love and cherish in our own fashion. We are very proud of where we are from and we’ve spent the last 20 years trying to bring a bit of our version of home to the rest of the world... It may have taken 20 years, but everything has fallen in place right where it needs to be,” acknowledges Nichols. “There were some dark days in those middle years, but we’ve learned how to do this and survive. We still write heartbreak songs, but now, with a family at home, it’s a whole new kind of heartbreak.”   Among the Ghosts lays out that new territory with alacrity, as Lucero shines their Morning Star, burning just as brightly, if not more so, 20 years later. As one of the album’s song titles so aptly puts it, “Everything Has Changed”, but one thing hasn’t... Lucero’s music remains more vital than ever.

TopHouse

Expectations versus reality. Unbridled optimism versus rugged lived experience. Theory versus Practice. This is the conflict at the center of Tophouse’s dueling new EPs. Theory, released in May 2024, brims with hope, optimism, and the unshakeable knowledge that hard circumstances and people can change for the better. The new EP, Practice is different. While the band’s intricate arrangements and high-energy performances carry through, the subject matter and outlook of these new songs stands in stark contrast to the upbeat and hopeful worldview of Theory. “We didn’t start out writing these songs with a two-part set of EPs in mind,” says lead vocalist Joe Larson. “But when they were written and we were looking at how to arrange them on an album, the clear delineation of themes became pretty apparent. The idealistic, hopeful worldview that we can all strive for in Theory, up against the hard reality that life doesn’t always work out the way we want in Practice.” “I Don’t Wanna Move On” is a stark meditation on coming to terms with separation. The chorus repeats, like a rosary, swelling to a frenetic burst of cathartic acoustic energy. “Meteor”, bolstered by lush string arrangements and Western electric guitar, is about crashing and burning from self-sabotage. The Western elements in this song, themselves a rarer color palette for Tophouse, are contrasted by a vaguely sci-fi string track. On “Waste”, the band confronts the consequences and loneliness of living with past mistakes. The song’s vivid imagery places the listener in a frigid, stark, and lonely moment asking the haunting question – is every experience worth having, or are some experiences worth never having at all? Tophouse, comprised of Larson (lead vocals, guitar, banjo), Jesse Davis (guitar, mandolin, percussion, backing vocals), William Cook (violin, backing vocals), and Andy LaFave (piano, backing vocals), formed in 2016 in Missoula, Montana, where Cook and Davis met in the music program at the University of Montana. They began as a street performing duo, honing their craft performing instrumental originals on the streets (and empty parking garages) of Missoula. Cook soon brought Larson, a longtime friend, into the fold and the trio began recording original songs and performing up and down the stunningly beautiful Bitterroot Valley. In late 2019, the boys were faced with a hard choice: keep growing their personal and professional lives in Missoula and leave music as just a hobby or leave their beloved home state and move across the country to Nashville and devote themselves to music. They chose the latter. “It was sort of always the plan to move to Music City” says Larson, “I think it was a combination of naiveté́ and the desire to make the whole music thing a concrete part of our lives.” Within a few months of moving to the Southeast, the world ground to a halt due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Stuck in an unfamiliar city with nowhere to go, the trio hunkered down and honed their craft. As the world began to cautiously open back up, the band reemerged with new music and a new member: Lafave, an old friend of the boys from back home, rounding out the sound with piano. In the spring of 2022, Tophouse began posting videos of their performances on social media. Much to their surprise, within weeks their posts began getting traction and the views continued to multiply as their online following expanded quickly and consistently. Wasting no time, the boys sought to move this connection with new fans from the screen to real life. The started booking shows themselves and began touring as much as possible wherever possible. They played any stage, backyard, bar, brewery or living room that would have them between Nashville and Montana. Somehow, word spread and people kept showing up, sometimes driving hours to attend these tiny shows. It was truly amazing and the four band-members took none of it for granted. The growing audience only made them work harder on both on their live experience and cultivating a community with their fans. It wasn’t long after when Tophouse found a likeminded manager and booking agent who shared their vision and work ethic. Soon the rooms and crowds grew larger and larger. Even their Instagram is nearing 300,000 followers. Within two years, Tophouse went from playing to anyone who would listen to selling out shows across the entirety of the United States. So, what is a Tophouse show like? One of the defining characteristics of a Tophouse show is the contrast between their tight, energetic performances and their warm and witty stage banter in between songs. Cook might recite a passage from a beloved book to background accompaniment. Davis might begin an impromptu Q & A with the audience. It’s the comfort and chemistry of four people who have known each other for a very long time and are perfectly OK with just being themselves. Who they are onstage is exactly who they are offstage. Of all the things that have come together for these four homegrown Montana boys, what rises above it all are the fans. The connection forged between Tophouse and their fans is genuine and infectious. This is apparent when you hear their passionate audiences enthusiastically belting out the choruses and singing the verses at every show. Or, when you see the fan art shared online or in-person or hear the emotional stories of how Tophouse’s songs have become the soundtrack to their loves, losses, triumphs and tragedies. “It really is the best part,” Larson says; “getting to hear how our little songs can be used in so many different ways. It’s very encouraging.” Four old friends from Montana sharing their music with new friends everywhere. That’s Tophouse, and they’re just getting started.