Further Listening:

5. I Have A Real Affinity For The Music Of Loma

Featuring members of Cross Record and Shearwater, I was already interested in Loma before I’d even heard their music, thankfully across three albums and counting, they’ve exceeded all expectations. Their stage-setting 2018 debut and 2020 follow-up, Don’t Shy Away, marked them out as a band even greater than the sum of their excellent parts. Since then, the band have been busy with other projects, creating geographical and temporal hurdles that at times must have seemed insurmountable. Thankfully, courtesy of a recording session in snow-swept Dorset, a long way from their Texan beginnings in all senses of the phrase, the band rolled the dice and came up with something rather special. The result is their new album, How Will I Live Without A Body? Which was released last week via Sub Pop and previewed by a video for the track that gave the album its title, Affinity.

Affinity showcases one of the record’s more unusual collaborators, an AI generator created and trained by the poetry of Laurie Anderson, who allowed the band to use it for inspiration. Loma’s Jonathan Meiburg sent the machine a series of pictures and it threw back poetry, snippets of which are featured in Affinity, including the album’s title, which Dan Duszynski concluded, “would be a perfect name for the album, since we nearly lost sight of each other in the recording process”. Affinity opens with shuffling woodwind, seeming to almost tumble into existence before Emily Cross’ breathy, shimmering vocal joins alongside a gently propulsive drum rhythm. The whole thing has a swirling, hypnotic quality, walking the line between psych-folk and Portishead-like trip-hop. The part-generated lyrics just adding to the track’s inherent mystery, the words at once meaningless and oddly loaded with imagery, “I tried to speak to someone beyond me, the only face I ever see was all around me”. With each new release, Loma just seem to add more strings to their bow, more intrigue to their story and more evidence of what a truly special band they are.

How Will I Live Without A Body? is out now via Sub Pop. For more information on Loma visit https://lomatheband.com/.

4. Take A Dip – Feeling Figures’ Music Is Lovely

It was November last year when Feeling Figures, a Montreal-based quartet built around the songwriting partnership of Zakary Slax and Kay Moon, announced themselves to the world with the release of their debut album, Migration Magic. Or did they? Because Migration Magic is actually in a way, the band’s second record. Before that record came into being, the band descended into their drummer’s basement, loaded up a reel-to-reel recorder and made Everything Around You, a record that dials down some of Migration Magic’s punchier tendencies from something broader in scope, more patient and quite possibly even more intriguing. That record will now see the light of day as their second release, with Everything Around You, out in September as a joint release by K Records and Perennial. Ahead of the release, this week the band shared the first single from it, Swimming.

Swimming is a track that wastes no time making its mark, it races out the blocks with an explosion of guitar clatter and racing kick-drum. For all the impressive noisiness on show, evident beneath it is a really great pop song, even if it’s delivered through a woozy, wonky lens. Particularly great are the twin vocals, they’re delightfully contrasting, Kay’s icy cool playing off against Zakary’s more angsty swagger, bringing to the mind fellow noise-pop pioneers Witching Waves. The whole thing races by in two blink-and-you’ll-miss-it minutes, leaving the listener pummeled and thrilled in equal measure, and suggesting Everything Around You, might just be one of the year’s most intriguing releases.

Everything Around You is out September 27th via K Records and Perennial. For more information on Feeling Figures visit https://feelingfigures.bandcamp.com/.

3. Sinai Vessel Have The Last Laugh

First appearing on these pages back in 2020 around the release of his fourth album, Ground Aswim, Sinai Vessel’s music has taken a somewhat circuitous route towards the gentle acclaim being deservedly heaped his way. Now signed to the ever-brilliant Keeled Scales, Sinai Vessel is the project of Asheville, North Carolina-based songwriter Caleb Cordes, who for his fifth album decided to embrace immediacy, writing the most compelling and accessible songs of his career to date on the “genre-agnostic” new collection, I Sing, out at the end of July. Ahead of the record’s much-anticipated arrival, this week Caleb shared his latest single, Laughing.

Discussing Laughing, Caleb suggests the track, “very explicitly deals with feeling the strain of living under capitalism in Nashville, which was (and still is) the largest city I’d ever called home”. The track reflects the city’s sometimes brutally rapid growth, Caleb recalling how, “the speed of development was pretty profoundly jarring“, even in a city he is very fond of, and musically inspired by, even as it swamped him with exhaustion. The creator’s mixed feelings about Nashville are evident in the music as much as the lyrics, as he combines some of the blue-collar indie of bands like Friendship or labelmates Good Looks with his own take on the country twang his former home city is famous for. Atop it all Caleb’s lyrics are equally uncertain, picturing the life he’d love to live, and then finding reality knocking down the door of his fantasy, “‘cos I’ve been waiting for the trickle-down but it’s been circling its exit for fifty years now”. The track ends with almost delirium, Caleb finding his way to the shoreline exhausted and exasperated in equal measure, “I am on its beach
and I’m smiling now
because it’s fucking free,
laughing, laughing, laughing to myself”. A truly exceptional piece of songwriting, Laughing sits perfectly at the meeting point of frustration and yielding, beautifully surmising that moment where you don’t know whether to burst into tears or burst out laughing at the ludicrous hopelessness of it all, a very real and very honest moment from this unflinchingly excellent musician.

I Sing is out July 26th via Keeled Scales. For more information on Sinai Vessel visit https://linktr.ee/sinaivessel.

2. She Might Be Leaving But MJ Lenderman Is Going Places Too

Continuing the excellent songwriters from Asheville, North Carolina theme, MJ Lenderman is a long-established favourite on the site, both for his work with Wednesday and as a now ANTI- Records signed solo superstar in the making. Although he’s been releasing music for a number of years, it was only really with the slow-burning success of 2022’s Boat Songs that MJ started to get the attention his songwriting so richly deserves, and with it the pressure of what comes next. The answer will arrive in September as he releases his latest effort, Manning Fireworks, which MJ previewed this week via his new single, She’s Leaving You.

While he’s always been a songwriter who manages to find the humour in the darkest moments, here MJ seems to almost dial it up a notch on a song described as, “a half-sneering portrait of a middle-aged man cheating his way through a midlife crisis”. Despite his relatively tender age, MJ has a voice that seems to play the middle-aged card beautifully, a croaking, worn and delightfully warming instrument, it perfectly suits the Bourbon-drenched bars, and seedy Vegas hotels he trails his sleazy protagonist through as the song plays out. While he doesn’t hide his disdain for his leading man, memorably quipping, “go rent a Ferrari and sing the blues, believe that Clapton was the second coming”, nor too does MJ entirely damn him either. As he sings at the song’s close, “it falls apart, we all got work to do, it gets dark, we all got work to do”, turning his lens back on us all, asking if any of us are truly the sinless ones entitled to cast the first stone his way. That all of this intriguing portrait painting happens to be set to one of the year’s most bombastic sing-along slices of country rock just makes it all the better, it already has the feeling of a live favourite in the making, you can practically hear an audience howling out, “she’s leaving you”, in weirdly joyous unison. Listening to this track, any worries that his newfound success might affect the songwriter MJ Lenderman always was just seem to melt away, he’s as unique, brilliant and intriguing as ever, there are just a lot more people paying him attention than there used to be, and he deserves every pair of ears coming his way.

Manning Fireworks is out September 6th via ANTI- Records. For more information on MJ Lenderman visit https://www.mjlenderman.com/.

1. Naima Bock’s New Track Is Far More Than Just Okaley

Naima Bock came crashing to my attention back in 2022 with the release of her critically lauded debut album, Giant Palm. One of that year’s finest records, the success of that record saw Naima hit the road, and she has barely been home since, sharing stages with everyone from Arab Strap to This Is The Kit. This week the London-based songwriter announced details of her upcoming second album, Below A Massive Dark Land, a record largely written alone in her grandma’s shed in South London, or in stolen moments between shows in whatever location her touring schedule took her to. With the record set for release at the end of September, this week Naima shared two singles from it, the stripped back Further Away, and the sparkling gem that is Kayley.

In keeping with much of the record’s gestation, Kayley was written, or at least finished, at a friend’s house in Tucson, Arizona. Described by Naima as being, “about betrayal and the subsequent lack of direction that follows”, Kayley offers both progression and familiarity. Fans of Naima’s earlier work, and frankly that should be all of you, will be delighted with the familiar playful instrumentation, and swaying majesty of the choruses, while those looking for something new will be delighted by the subtle choppiness of the rhythms. Particularly wonderful is the beautifully orchestrated outro, it’s somehow both grandiose and eloquent, as layers of Matthew E. White-like horns swirl and swoop, before a saxophone and fizzing guitar gradually come to the fore. Combined with the finger-picked folky tones of Further Away, this feels like a showcase of where Naima Bock’s music is headed next, and already I can’t wait to join her on that journey.

Below A Massive Dark Land is out September 27th via Sub Pop/Memorials of Distinction. For more information on Naima Bock visit https://www.naimabock.com/.

Header photo is Naima Bock by El Hardwick