Further Listening:

5. The Brights Have Got The Whole World In The Palm Of Their Hands

A five-piece band based out of Sydney / Gadigal, The Brights make music they describe as, “folk and alt-country leaning indie rock”. They first appeared in 2019, and have gone on to release two well-received EPs, 2020’s Though the Trampoline and 2022’s The Wind and Other Things. This December the band will team up with the much-loved Meritorio Records and Australian label, Stable Records to release their debut album, Oyster Rock! Ahead of that release, last week the band shared their new single, In My Hands.

Opening with an Elliott Smith-like waft of acoustic guitar, In My Hands is a delightfully subtle affair. The track’s twists and turns arrive as gentle bends, not sharp u-turns, from the way the meandering electric guitar just arrives and spends the rest of the track drifting around like it’s got no particular place to go, through to the pulsing swells of airy electronics that rise and fall, the steady breath that accompanies the drums ticking heartbeat. Even amidst all that musical elusiveness, the vocal melodies sound wonderfully delicate, the potential bombast of the shimmering Whitney-like harmonies are delivered with a deliciously gentle slowness. Lyrically too, the words arrive with precision on their own terms, as if they’re letting us in but guarding the full picture from sight, “I held it in my hands, you know I do the best I can, these things don’t always go as planned, and I can’t give it up”. Something of a departure from their previous jangle-pop ways, with In My Hands, The Brights remind us that in music, as in life, sometimes the fastest route isn’t always the best one.

Oyster Rock is out December 1st via Meritorio Records / Stable Records. For more information on The Brights visit https://thebrights.bandcamp.com/.

4. Lightheaded Are Anything But Overrated

A trio hailing from New Jersey, Lightheaded burst onto the indie-pop scene back in 2019 with their debut collection, Cowboys and Constellations. Along the way, the band caught the ear of the legendary Slumberland Records, and last week they shared their debut EP, Good Good Great, an amuse bouche for their debut album due early next year, and one they recently previewed with the EP’s sublime closing track, Love Is Overrated.

Never a band afraid to look backwards for inspiration, on Love Is Overrated, Lighteaded mine the 1960s for inspiration, combining the wall-of-sound pop perfection of The Shangri-Las or The Ronettes with a more modern Alvvays/Camera Obscura-like indie-pop flourish. This is a song that swoops and shimmies, a soundtrack for both shared heartaches on the dancefloor and headphones on solo defiance. To the fore throughout are Cynthia Rittenbach’s words even as she’s adorned with gorgeous string flourishes and pulsating drum rhythms her hushed vocals still demand your full attention, as she sings with just a little too much protestation, “the only boy I’ve ever dated, moved back to Ohio and that’s where he’ll stay. Love is overrated, love is overrated and I’m happy in my room”. While music can often feel part of a moment, Lightheaded remind us it can also be timeless, can cross eras and genres and still connect, Good Good Great is a record that feels like it could have come out anytime in the last fifty years and would be just as deserving of your time as it is right now.

Good Good Great is out now via Slumberland. For more information on Lightheaded visit https://areyoufeelinglightheaded.bandcamp.com/.

3. Lonely Tourist Really Does Take Some Beating

A Bristol-based Glaswegian, Lonely Tourist is Paul Tierney, a songwriter who variously dubs his musical genres as beard pop or pub-step and is quite possibly still best known for a song about his namesake footballer he released over a decade ago. He’s spent the subsequent years gigging, releasing new music, getting raved about by Steve Lamacq and generally doing the things you’d expect of any self-respecting DIY musician in the 2020s. Last year he released the somewhat self-effacingly titled Best Of album, Songs From The Set, and following on from March’s single Duty of Care, last week Paul shared his latest offering, This Place Takes a Lot of Beating.

Lifting its title from a 1960s postcard from Glasgow, This Place Takes a Lot of Beating is, in Paul’s own words a, “pub step strum using an imaginary night out with the worst person imaginable as an analogy for life at the moment”. Occupying a similar musical space to Steven Adams or King Creosote at his most jaunty, the track bounds in on layers of guitars, prominent bass and rapid-fire drum tick, chugging through the verses before soaring into the chorus refrain, “this place takes a lot of beating, but not as much beating as we take ourselves”. Particularly wonderful is the breathless breakdown, Paul’s words suddenly become a spoken-word tumble as the instruments melt away beneath him as he in his own subtle way asks for deeds, not words, noting, “I don’t want to sit around and never solve a problem”. In an era where success is often seen as a flash of fame, Lonely Tourist feel like something altogether more earthy, an artist simply making the best music they can and letting it speak, sing and soar all on its own.

This Place Takes a Lot of Beating is out now. For more information on Lonely Tourist visit https://lonelytourist.bandcamp.com/.

2. Mol Sullivan Is Really Cracking

Described as one of the Cincinnati music scene’s best-kept secrets since the early 2010s, Mol Sullivan announced herself to the wider world with her first proper studio release, the well-received EP, A Little Hello. Wasting no time in following up, last week Mol shared news of her debut album, GOOSE, a record she describes as, a “long exposure photograph” of fifteen years of songwriting. Ahead of the album’s release in January, she previewed the record with her new single, Eggshells.

Living up to the fragility of its title, Eggshells is a song that explores unhealthy friendships, and the difficulty of letting go while still maintaining love for the person in question. The track flickers and dances through the early stages, before it comes to a crashing head, as Mol repeatedly pleads for simplicity, asking, “why’s it got to be so hard?” Despite the potential heaviness of the lyrical themes, Eggshells is always playful in its musicality, the choppy bounce of the piano rhythm adorned with buzzing woodwind, layered backing vocals and contrasting driving fuzz of the bass. The song ends with Mol turning to the titular as she sings, “you learned the hard way, it turned into a thing, now we’re eggshell dancing”, a perfect metaphor for skipping around someone else’s needs, and the futility and potential pain of not finding the words to say how you’re really feeling. Years of songwriting and effort went into making Mol Sullivan the songwriter she is today, and it shows, as her confident, playful songwriting collides with her thoughtful lyrical themes to suggest that GOOSE might be not just one of 2024’s first albums, but one of its finest as well.

GOOSE is out January 26th. For more information on Mol Sullivan visit https://www.molsullivan.com/.

1. Alena Spanger’s Saintly New Single

Best known up until now as the leader of the lauded Brooklyn art-rock band Tiny Hazard, since the band’s dissolution in 2017, Alena Spanger has been performing around New York, as well as touring with Buck Meek and prepping the material with which she’ll be launching her solo career. Last week Alena shared the first glimpse of her own music in the shape of her new single, Agios.

A word meaning saint or sacred in Greek, Agios explores both the weight of history from Alena’s ancestral homeland and the beauty that’s found within it. As listeners we seem to join the song’s narrator in the eye of an emotional storm, pulling away from a lover beneath the beating sun, the whole thing becoming a hallucinatory nightmare, the lines between reality and fiction blurring and bending beyond recognition. Musically, the track explores the array of influences that flicker in Alena’s songwriting, combining elements of folk balladry, modern pop production and minimal electronica, as the ebbing keyboard picks out melody-rich runs before it is joined by rushes of muted brass and subtle rhythmic percussion. Sure it might just be our first glimpse of where Alena Spanger’s music could go, yet it feels like we’re in very safe hands, a songwriter bristling with ideas and ready to share them with the world.

Agios is out now via Ruination Record Co. For more information on Alena Spanger visit https://alenaspanger.bandcamp.com/.

Header photo is Alena Spanger by Chelsea Wooten.