Last month, SPELLLING announced her new album Portrait Of My Heart and released the gripping title track, which was one of our favorite songs of the week. Today, she’s back with another beautiful banger titled “Alibi.”
“Alibi” was originally a piano ballad, which is hard to imagine. Much like “Portrait Of My Heart,” “Alibi” is an exuberant, triumphant explosion of sound. Listen below.
02 – SPELLLING – “Portrait Of My Heart”
SPELLLING has a knack for making music that sounds like it’s from another galaxy. “Portrait Of My Heart” is Chrystia Cabral’s newest otherworldly tune — taken from her just-announced new album of the same title — and it’s as fun as it is celestial. With enchanting strings and a cathartic chorus, “Portrait Of My Heart” serves as a cinematic, urgent anthem about alienation. It’s the best possible first preview of Portrait Of My Heart. –Danielle
For Portrait Of My Heart, Cabral assembled a band with Wyatt Overson on guitar, Patrick Shelley on drums, and Giulio Xavier Cetto on bass. It has Drew Vandenberg, Rob Bisel, and Psymun on production, and features special guests like Chaz Bear of Toro y Moi, Turnstile guitarist Pat McCrory, and Zulu’s Braxton Marcellous. “Portrait Of My Heart” is a bewitching first taste; the song is a sweet indie-pop epic, even stronger paired with the Ambar Navarro-directed music video of Cabral dancing and singing in her bedroom, opening up a portal to another world. Fall under her spell below.
“The city of Olympia in Washington has declared today, August 23, “Bikini Kill Day,” in honor of the foundational riot grrrl band, which famously formed in 1990 with members Kathleen Hanna, Billy Karren, Kathi Wilcox, and Tobi Vail. (The current lineup includes Hanna, Wilcox, Vail, and touring guitarist Sara Landeau.) The honor is another feather in the band’s 2024 cap; earlier this year, Hanna released her memoir Rebel Girl: My Life As A Feminist Punk, Bikini Kill made their late-night TV debut on Colbert, and the band is currently on tour”
Yo Gabba Gabba! is back. The kids television show is being revived as Yo Gabba GabbaLand!, and it comes with a soundtrack with an impressive list of names such as Kurt Vile, Ty Segall, and Thundercat.
After sharing the songs “Void” and “Eggman,” Ty Segall announced his new album Three Bells in November and unveiled “My Room.” Today, just a few weeks before the LP’s release, he’s unleashing the wholesome final single “My Best Friend” with an adorable music video.
Over the past few months, Ty Segall has released a couple singles — “Void” and “Eggman” — and today he’s announcing a new full-length album, which those two tracks will appear on, alongside today’s new song “My Room.”
Last month, Ty Segall released a new single, “Void,” accompanied by the announcement of a North American tour that will kick off next year. Today, Segall is back with another track, “Eggman,’ which comes with a video of him trying to eat a whole lot of eggs.
Hey, Ty Segall released a seven-minute experimental prog-rock song! “Void,” released today to accompany Segall’s 2024(!) tour announcement, is a relative rarity within the veteran garage-rocker’s extensive catalog. It begins with an eerie, dissonant acoustic arpeggio and builds layers from there. It never really settles into the hard-charging take-no-prisoners mode I associate with Segall’s live show, but it eventually bottoms out into something like ominous classic rock, like a proto-metal version of late-period Beatles.
“Rich Homie Quan talked the talk, but John Dwyer walks the walk: The man will never stop going in. The prolific underground rock legend stayed busy with a zillion improvisational side projects during the pandemic, and it didn’t stop him from releasing a new album with main band OSEES last year. Now — on the release date of the new Live At Levitation — he’s already following up A Foul Form with Intercepted Message, another new OSEES LP”
King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard came out of 2022 with five new albums, and the prolific Australian psych-rockers already have another new one on the way. They announced their 24th studio album in an Instagram post: It’s called PetroDragonic Apocalypse; Or, Dawn Of Eternal Night: An Annihilation Of Planet Earth And The Beginning Of Merciless Damnation and pre-orders for the album start on May 16, though they haven’t disclosed a release date just yet.
“Ultimately DeMarco spent four months in this state of creative transit. The result is a rewarding abundance of vibes and textures, less a collection of songs than a state of mind to be explored. It’s as chill as you’d expect — as chill as you’d hope. Stream Five Easy Hot Dogs below.”
“Last year, Le Tigre performed together for the first time in over a decade at the This Ain’t No Picnic festival in Los Angeles. Today, the dance-punk trio — which is made up of Kathleen Hanna, JD Samson, and Johanna Fateman — has announced their first full-scale tour in 18 years, which will kick off in May and continue on through the summer. It includes stops at multiple Primavera-associated events and at Mosswood Meltdown Festival, which is hosted by John Waters.”
“In October, SXSW 2023 (taking place this year from March 13-18) announced its initial wave of performers. Now, the Austin fest’s music portion has shared another giant round of performers (301, to be exact), including …. the recently reunited Be Your Own Pet, OSEES…”
“The Melbourne band, one of the most formidable live acts in the world, also somehow finds time to release more albums than almost anyone, with an admirable degree of quality control. This month they’ve already released two albums, the Can-inspired cut-and-paste exercise Ice, Death, Planets, Lungs, Mushrooms And Lava (for which they jammed their way into songs in the studio and edited them together afterwards) and the motorik rave-up Laminated Denim (comprising two 15-minute songs, each one written at 120 bpm to mimic the pulse of a ticking clock). Today they’re back with the last album of this October outpouring”
“Ty Segall, his wife Denée, and the Cairo Gang’s Emmett Kelly formed a band called the C.I.A. back in 2018 and released their debut album that same year. Now they’ve recorded a follow-up to it, which is called Surgery Channel and will be out early next year. Today, they’re sharing the album’s lead single, the demonic and pulsing “Impersonator.”
“It was originally going to be the fifth album that we made in 2017,” the band’s Stu Mackenzie said in our recent KGLW cover story. “We had it locked in to be the fifth record. And we recorded what we thought was going to be the album in 2017. It just wasn’t fully realized at that time. We didn’t have the musical vocabulary to actually complete this idea.” On Changes, “we’re kind of flicking between key like every chord change on every song,” he explained. “It’s these two keys, and they shouldn’t be in tune with each other, basically. We’re sort of flicking between them the whole time.”
“It also happens to be 10 years to the day since they released their first, 12 Bar Bruise. In the decade since that record’s fried echo-chamber psych-surf shenanigans, King Gizz have tried their hand at (among other things) a Spaghetti Western epic narrative, heady jazz fusion, dreamy psychedelic folk, prog-metal short stories, woozy soft rock, brain-melted boogie, charred primitivist thrash, panoramic synth-pop, and extensive experiments with microtonal composition — most of it merged seamlessly into the zany garage-punk jam-band vibe that has made them one of the most infectiously fun live acts in the world. They’ve also documented that concert experience via umpteen live albums and official bootlegs freely uploaded for their fans to download and distribute how they see fit. It’s a rare group that can convincingly blur the lines between Phish, Neu!, King Crimson, and the Osees while never sounding like anything less than themselves”
King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard already shared “Ice V,” a 10-minute track that’ll appear on Ice, Death, Planets, Lungs, Mushrooms And Lava. Today, they’ve also shared the free-flowing nine-minute rave-up “Iron Lung.” It’s a percussive acid-rock explosion with some nice, sinuous riffage and a whole lot of guitar theatrics, and it sounds like the work of a fully locked-in jam band. In a press release, band member Stu Mackenzie says, “We wrote the lyrics as a group and created the music out of improvisation. Spontaneous creation. The best kind. And that’s why I’m proud of it. Hope you dig.”
The year is almost over and King Gizzard And The Lizard Wizard have only put out two albums in 2022, the double LP Omnium Gatherum and the vinyl-exclusive Made In Timeland, which means that the Australian psych-rock band appears to be slacking. Except … KGLW have just announced that they’re releasing three albums next month.
‘Human psych-rock factory Ty Segall isn’t the type to sit still for long. Last summer, Segall released his surprise LP Harmonizer. Earlier this year, he followed that LP with his soundtrack for the documentary Whirlybird. And now Segall has announced plays to drop a whole new LP on the world this summer, and he’s shared its absolute rocker of a first single.’
In a few days, prolific psych-rockers King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard will release their new album, Omnium Gatherum, which follows last year’s Butterfly 3000. So far, the Australian band shared an 18-minute single “The Dripping Tap” and “Magenta Mountain.” Now, they’re back with another album cut: “Kepler-22b,” which also has a music video.
‘Nashville indie-sleaze staples Be Your Own Pet only ever released two albums — 2006’s self-titled and 2008’s Get Awkward. After breaking up in 2008, band members Jemima Pearl, Jamin Orrall, Jonas Stein, and John Eatherly went on to various other projects (Jamin Orrall is one half of JEFF The Brotherhood, for example). Now, however, Be Your Own Pet are reuniting for a pair of shows opening for Jack White’s Supply Chain Issues Tour, their first performances together in 14 years.’
‘Australian psych-rock goon squad King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard are already so wildly prolific that it seems almost unfair to add remix albums to the pile. Nevertheless, they’re following up last year’s synthy Butterfly 3000 with Butterfly 3001, a new space odyssey/remix album featuring reworkings of the original LP’s tracks from artists like the Flaming Lips, Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith, DāM-FunK, Peaches, and Peaking Lights.’
“With his remix, Shadow has turned “Black Hot Soup” into a classic Shadow banger, a breakbeat-driven funk workout that only takes a few elements from the original track. Shadow’s “My Own Reality Re-Write” of the song layers tumbling drums over a heavy bassline and a whole lot of record-scratching, and it sounds like a beautiful circa-1997 vision of a future that sadly never came to pass.”
‘King Gizzard magically arrived at their most generously melodic and open-hearted album to date. It wouldn’t be accurate to call Butterfly 3000 the band’s synth-pop album. Their trademark motorik thrust is still in effect; it simply veers toward the more electro-curious side of the kosmiche-rock canon — less “Mother Sky,” more Harmonia.’
‘As SPELLLING, Chrystia Cabral has been making darkly alluring experimental pop for years. The Turning Wheel maintains the darkness, the allure, and Cabral’s experimental touch, yet she has turned up the pop quotient significantly here.’
‘SPELLLING is releasing her new album, The Turning Wheel, in a couple weeks. We’ve heard two tracks from it so far, “Little Dear” and “Boys At School,” and today we’re getting the title track, which sounds like an elaborate ’60s pop fantasia with an appropriately theatrical video to match.’
‘King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard have shared some details about their second studio album of 2021, called Butterfly 3000, which arrives 11 June on the KGLW label. The twist? They won’t be releasing any advance singles or album artwork until release day.’
