Further Listening:

5. You Can’t Miss The Signs With Dallas Ugly

Hailing from Nashville, Dallas Ugly are the trio of Libby Weitnauer, Eli Broxham, and Owen Burton, friends and collaborators for decades, before they officially formed the band back in 2020. Last year saw the band hammer home their potential with their well-received debut album, Watch Me Learn, a genre-bending collection that took the Nashville sound and sent it spiralling off in almost every direction. For their next move the band have brought on board Grammy-winning producer Justin Ryan Francis, and this week they shared the first sign of this new direction in the form of their latest single, Big Signs.

Discussing Big Signs, Libby recalls how it came from, “a reckoning about a sense of stagnation—in my life and personal growth. Nothing was bad but nothing was great either, and I knew it was time to blow my life up a little and make some space for new things”. The band’s ever-evolving sound makes for a fine backdrop for reimagining a life, there’s a mischievousness both to the playful bounce of the bass, and the almost comically twangy lead guitar, which wouldn’t sound out of place on a comedy western. Atop it all is Libby’s vocal which is wonderfully contradictory, on the one hand, it sounds joyous, the playful pulsing melody delivered with a wink and a nod, even as the words depict a moment of anarchic release, “I must be looking for a fight with my future, I’ve got no reason why I should torch this ship and watch it die, I just think I get tired of feeling fine”. It’s the musical equivalent of pressing the big red button, of turning over a blank page in your life story, of letting it all burn and seeing what fresh shoots emerge from the fertile ash – thrilling, a little bit dangerous and an awful lot of fun, Dallas Ugly have never sounded more vital.

Big Signs is out now. For more information on Dallas Ugly visit https://www.dallasugly.com/.

4. Uh Oh Here Come Truth Club

Based in Raleigh, North Carolina, Truth Club first appeared back in 2019 when they released their debut album, Not An Exit. Freshly signed to the Double Double Whammy label, next month will see the band release their second record, Running From The Chase, their first with their current four-piece lineup after guitarist/bassist and singer Yvonne Chazal joined the original trio. The album was recorded in the Asheville studio of producer and engineer Alex Farrar, known for his work with Angel Olsen, Wednesday and most recently Squirrel Flower, with whom the band will tour the US this Autumn. Ahead of those tour dates, and the album’s release, this week Truth Club shared the latest preview of the record, their new track Uh Oh.

Running From The Chase is an album that exists very much in the moment, a record that feels uncertain of its next move, confident neither of where it came from nor where it might be headed next. The tracks began when the band’s frontman Travis Harrington was at his lowest ebb, struggling with his mental health challenges, and unable to really finish anything he was working on. As things in his life improved he went back to that difficult place, through the songs he started, “trying to extract the ugly hopelessness and put it in this jar I can observe from time to time as a point of reference for what that looks like in my brain”. Musically, Truth Club deal in the intense corners of the 90s-alternative scene, the guitars chug intensely over cymbal-heavy drum rhythms as Travis howls out his troubles, and his hope that music can heal the wounds, “each day attempt to plead that little songs can outpace the pains that chase us all”. It’s perhaps that feeling of togetherness that bonds Truth Club, the sense that music can do anything, “music has taught me what an enduring friendship looks like, how to maintain one, how to communicate ineffectively, how to improve upon that, how to be supportive”. A band gaining so much from making music are perhaps unsurprisingly one well worth listening to, a shared passion between band and listener that could just be the start of a beautiful friendship.

Running From The Chase is out October 6th via Double Double Whammy. For more information on Truth Club visit https://linktr.ee/truthclub.

3. Dolly Valentine Is Thriving In The In-Between

A native of Cincinnati, Ohio, Dolly Valentine now calls the other side of the Atlantic home after relocating to Europe following the release of her acclaimed debut album, How To Be Good. If How To Be Good came from a place of joy and light, then the follow-up, The In-Between, is altogether more mysterious, tapping into a genre Dolly calls, “Fairy Western”, where Americana collides with the ethereal and folkloric. Recorded in a remote church studio in Scotland, The In-Between explores, “a familiarity with destruction as part of the refining process” as it walks the line between impending doom and unending hope. With the record out today, this week Dolly shared the final taster of it, in the shape of The In-Between’s majestic title track.

The title track, The In-Between is described as, “a tongue-in-cheek dive into the self aggrandizing times we live in”. It reflects on the modern obsession with overplaying your hand, and the rise of comparison and mimicry in modern society, “where most motivation seems to be coming from a drive toward imitation rather than true expression“. Recalling the likes of Ada Lea or Indigo De Souza, Dolly’s music seems to exist in darkened corners, her hushed vocal accompanied by a spiky, cutting drum beat and prominent rolling bass line as she muses on imitation and compares herself to everyone from “Buffalo in a pink mini dress“, to “Joan Didion when I Play It As It Lays“. Within her disparaging take on modern culture, there’s a sense here of wanting to escape from it, as the song progresses, a wheezing accordion-like instrument arrives cutting through the bassy fog as she reaches out a hand to be saved, to be delivered to somewhere real, “if I go too deep, will you pull me in? Take me somewhere we can touch, we can go anywhere when we feel this much“. While her music may be heading towards the fantastical darkness, Dolly Valentine knows that often it is reality that is the most scary place to be, escapist sketches with one foot in humanity suggest Dolly Valentine’s latest move might just be her most intriguing one yet.

The In-Between is out today via AWAL. For more information on Dolly Valentine visit https://www.dollyvalentinemusic.com/

2. Raveloe Unleashes The Clouds

Something of a regular on these pages, Raveloe is the musical project of Motherwell-raised, and now Glasgow-based musician, Kim Grant. Raveloe is a name lifted from a character in George Elliot’s Silas Marner, a weaver by trade, something Kim seeks to replicate in her musical tapestries, stitching together words, music and fictional worlds to create something far grander than its constituent parts. After returning last month with the beautiful Rustle The Leaves, this week Kim shared a further road sign to where her music could be headed next, in the shape of a new single Clouds And Release.

Musically, Clouds And Releases is a real shift for Raveloe, where previous releases were glistening, alt-folk sketches, here things take a turn towards something bolder and more dynamic, the wavering introduction quickly giving way to driving distorted indie-rock reminiscent of The National or Big Thief. While the track drifts into both the personal and the universal, at its core it tells the story of Margaret Gallagher, as Kim recalls, “she lives alone, and largely off of the land in a cottage that is heated by a hearth which she works around the day to keep alight, and has an intimate knowledge of her surroundings and its patterns”. The story inspired Kim, “it brought me some kind of calm when I was going through difficult times, it reminded me to connect with what’s around me, observe patterns, hold space for the simple joys when they come and know that all things and feelings will pass”. While Raveloe’s music has always been intriguing to me, Clouds Are Release hints at an artist ready to step out of her DIY roots and into the mainstream, a stadium-sized single from an artist who now sounds more ready than ever to make a huge breakthrough.

Clouds Are Release is out now via Olive Grove Records. For more information on Raveloe visit https://www.instagram.com/raveloemusic.

1. Hannah Frances Opens The Floodgates

Based out of Chicago, Hannah Frances is a multidisciplinary musician, composer, and poet, who emerged back in 2017, and who the world last heard new material from back in 2021 around the release of her fifth album, Bedrock. Two years on, and Hannah is already plotting out her 2024, with an as yet untitled new album on the way in March via Ruination Record Co, which Hannah previewed this week with her new single, Floodplain.

In Hannah’s interpretation, the titular floodplain serves as a metaphor for both endings and new beginnings, “I was nearing the end of a grief cycle and releasing narratives that were keeping me stagnant in my growth, images of floodplains, riverbeds, and dams kept arising from me“. The song serves as a reminder of self, and the importance of getting back to who you are as part of the healing process, “I felt like I was scraping the earth with my bare hands trying to remember wholeness again, loosening the grips of my heart to let go, and seeing myself as a birch tree stripped bare with moss growing over through maturation“. Hannah expresses this sense of release via a timeless slice of folk, her finger-picked guitars adorned with flashes of cello, as she nods to both legendary performers like Karen Dalton or Vashti Bunyan as well as more modern contemporaries from Shannon Lay to Laura Marling. Perhaps like the river, Hannah just needs somewhere to spill over, that moment of release that allows the past to be the past and the future to be whatever you want it to be, as she sings, “don’t want to be forgotten, but want to forget. I want to be shaped by the love I have, not haunted by the lack“. Thankfully with a song this good, Hannah Frances isn’t someone you’re going to forget anytime soon.

Floodplain is out now via Ruination Record Co. For more information on Hannah Frances visit https://hannahfrancesmusic.com/.

Header photo is Hannah Frances by Rose Bernhard