Further Listening HERE

5. Joanna Samuels Just Can’t Make Up Her Mind About Weezer

Back in April, to the sound of much rejoicing around these parts, Johanna Samuels returned with a new single, White Limousine, shared alongside news of her signing to Odd Man Out Records. It was the LA-based songwriter’s first new material since 2024’s First and Last, and the first taste of her new studio album, Sorry, Kid. With the Jonathan Rado-produced album set to arrive in mid-August, this week Johanna shared the latest taster of the record, in the shape of the Weezer referencing single, Blue vs Pinkerton.

A showcase of the songwriter’s craft, Blue vs Pinkerton was written in response to a songwriting prompt to, “paint a visceral experience of a specific time and place”. Johanna recalls how, “I chose my sophomore and junior year of high school“, reflecting on the universal youthful experience, recalling the, “crushes and friends and my first cigarettes“, but mainly the music, as she explains, “what connected me most to myself and to my community was the music that I loved. I love songs about music“. The song was inspired by a former crush who asked if Johanna was, “a Pinkerton girl or a Blue Album girl“, before she knew what that question even meant. The crush faded, but the music remained as Johanna explains, “the debate was a perfect metaphor for what that time was like so I wove the memories around that as a chorus“. While the lyrics might offer the most obvious hat-tip to Weezer, musically too, this is as close as Johanna is ever likely to get to the bands sound, with the distorted chug of electric guitars and splashy patter of the percussion. There’s even room for some background chatter, tapping into the way Weezer make you feel like you’re watching life happen to someone else while you sit on the sidelines. And as for a final answer to the great Weezer debate, well, just don’t ask Johanna to choose; “Blue or Pinkerton is still a question I don’t have the answer to“.

Sorry, Kid is out August 14th via Odd Man Out Recordings / Jealous Butcher. For more information on Johanna Samuels visit https://www.johannasamuels.com/

4. Sing Up For A Crash Course On Myer U Clark

Although signed to one of the UK’s finest folk-led labels, Broadside Hacks, Myer U Clark has always been someone who sits on the edge of the folk world. With a style he describes as, “musical jank”, he’s found himself touring with the likes of Naima Bock and Sorry, and sharing stages with Truthpaste and The Slow Country, straddling the worlds of folk and the independent underground. Whatever label you feel like attaching to him, he’s someone very much on the rise, with support from 6Music and all the finest online tastemakers. This week he released his debut album, Tinderbox, shared alongside his new single, Surviving Colliding.

Discussing Surviving Colliding, Myer recalls how it was written at the start of a new relationship, “it’s mainly about not being afraid of those big feelings and learning to embrace them whilst not letting them engulf you“. Musically, the track was equally inspired by letting things happen, with the drums that underpin the track being, “a surprising last-minute addition…they were nothing like how I imagined the song sounding, but I grew to love them very much“. While you can certainly hear how Myer might have written this in a more traditionally folk-leaning style, the finished piece nods to a much more modern sound. The skittish lead guitar line adorned briefly with everything from mandolin to piano and Myer’s easy-going vocal, the middle ground of Nick Drake and Stephen Malkmus. Here, as he does across much of Tinderbox, Myer seems to rewrite the expectations for what a modern folk singer does; by trusting his instincts, Myer has moved his music into an intriguing musical space, carving out a wonderful niche entirely of his own.

Tinderbox is out now via Broadside Hacks. For more information on Myer U Clark visit https://linktr.ee/myeruclark.

3. Frank Lloyd Wleft Is Such An Angel

The Actual Kids In Actual America is both the title of Frank Lloyd Wleft and His Orchestra’s debut album and the first song I ever heard from him back in 2024, so it can definitely be considered an album many years in the making. In fact, its origins go back further, to 2022, and a solo coast-to-coast trip that Lloyd took across the States, the culmination of a, “complicated love affair with a complicated nation”. With the album out now via Strong Island Records, this week Lloyd shared the latest single from it, Angel Camp.

The track finds Lloyd, as always, tapping into the rich history of America, in this case the folk group the Carter Family and their lead singer Sara Carter and the small town she moved to after she broke up the band. Lloyd recalling, “I read a story about folk song collector/modern polymath Harry Smith tracking her down to interview her about quilt-making and the rest sorta followed from there“. Leaning heavily into the influence of Woody Guthrie and the early American-folk boom, Angels Camp could easily sound like a pastiche, yet Lloyd and his band do it with such love and integrity it never slips into anything that mawkish. Instead, armed with little more than a guitar and two voices, Lloyd creates a campfire anthem through a Wes Anderson lens. Lyrically, the track seems to pick apart the life of a jobbing musician, blending thankfulness for an opportunity with the scars of falling off the hamster wheel, channelling Sara Carter as he pictures both the days working hard, “every night we fall in love, we dance and jump and sing, anything we could to keep the jukebox wheel in spin“, and the opportunity that gave, “thank the lord for giving me something that the family can sell”. While Frank Lloyd Wleft’s music always drips with a love for all things America, it doesn’t glamourise it, resulting in something more John Steinbeck than Walt Disney. He knows it’s a place of dreams that don’t always play out quite as you hoped, where offerings are made at the shrine of capitalism and gold rush towns end up empty except for the museums the long gone gold built.

The Actual Kids in Actual America is out July 4th via Strong Island Records. For more information on Frank Lloyd Wleft and His Orchestra visit https://linktr.ee/franklloydwleft.

2. Everyone’s Going To Love The Tubs Now

The crafters of one of my favourite records of last year, The Tubs’ rise is both wonderfully deserved and slightly surprising. After all, Owen Williams has plenty of attempts at breaking through with the likes of Joanna Gruesome and Ex-Vöid, yet with Cotton Crown, released via the sadly now defunct Trouble In Mind Records, they seemed to really strike a chord. Now signed to Merge Records, an event marked somewhat untraditionally with a cover of Metallica’s Fade To Black, The Tubs this week shared details of their third album Hard Life, as well as releasing the first taster of it, Who’s Gonna Love You Now?

If Cotton Crown introduced us to one side of Owen’s personality, “navel gazing about romantic abjection, London squalor, and the indignities of grief and OCD”, on Who’s Gonna Love You Now we get to see another as he explains, “the lyrics are from my scold persona…I sermonise that the other Owen will end up lonely and unhappy if he takes a grass is greener approach to life, moves to London and so on“. If the lyrics pick up where Cotton Crown left off, musically too, it also finds The Tubs on relatively familiar ground, mining the history of jangle-pop and mashing it into the snarl of what’s left of the modern DIY-underground. The track enters with an urgent rat-a-tat on the drums, before the guitars enter at breakneck speed, bringing to mind the likes of Literature or Ducks Ltd. After the initial explosion, the track does eventually catch its breath, Owen’s vocal acting as something of a lead, leashing the instrumental urge to zoom off into distance like a Whippet after a rabbit. The lyrical telling-off is built around small anxious cuts, little needles that remind you it’s all going to go horribly wrong and you’ll be turfed out of your apartment, into the gutter staring at the stars, “it’s your life, but who’s gonna be there waiting when it falls down”. High concept, split personality pop? The Tubs are creating the sort of record you never knew you needed, but might just be exactly what you’ve always wanted.

Hard Life is out September 11th via Merge Records. For more information on The Tubs visit https://linktr.ee/thetubs

1. Nina Winder-Lind Is Doing It For The Girls

While the name Nina Winder-Lind might be new to you, there’s a good chance you know her, “Hagstone Rock” band, The New Eves. Alongside the day job, the Brighton-based Swedish songwriter dabbles in an all together different world, introduced both by her 2023 EP, The Spirit Is Carnal, and her poetry collection, Röd Ska Jag Leva. Working, like The New Eves, with Transgressive Records, Nina announced this week her debut album, Wild Love, out next month, as well as sharing the latest single from it, Girls.

Described by Nina as, “a kind of subconscious manifesto“, Girls began life as a poem that came to her quickly as a list of, “things that girls want to do“, an experience she suggests, “was empowering but it also unearthed a deep sadness“, as she puts it, “the triumph and the tremble”. Musically, it finds Nina and longtime collaborator The Cindy’s Jack Ogborne leaning into “the ultimate catharsis” of the electric-guitar, pairing it with urgent keys, twinkling glockenspiel and swells of strings and brass, like the middle ground of Suicide and The Velvet Underground. While the lyrics are as Nina suggests a list of desires, they’re built on ever shifting-sands, at times positive dreams (“Girls want to play guitar and dance and and sing”), at others angry (“Girls want to go to balls and break everything”/”Girls can crack your skull if they like”), sad (“a lot of the time girls cry, not really understanding why”), or, at the song close, quietly triumphant (“I didn’t understand that I was a flower, until I was much older. I didn’t understand my power, until I completely exploded”). In a way, this feels like the perfect solo side-step; it inhabits a different world to The New Eves while still appealing to a similar crowd. With music this good, the only worry is how Nina Winder-Lind is going to find the time to keep making more of it.

Wild Love is out August 14th via Transgressive. For more information Nina Winder-Lind visit https://linktr.ee/ninawinderlind

Header photo is Nina Winder-Lind by Silken Weinberg