Flowertown’s sweet lo-fi melodies evoke a landscape of beautifully distant sadness. Karina Gill and Mike Ramos front their own projects (Cindy and Tony Jay, respectively), but have joined together in May 2020 for a 6-track cassette EP to raise funds for Peter Hurley’s Hit Gallery. A second cassette EP, Theresa Street, came out in August (both for Paisley Shirt Records), and now the EPs are bound together into a debut (eponymous) vinyl LP from Mount St. Mountain.

Die Zärtlichkeit is a German jangle pop band from Cologne. Die Zärtlichkeit are Andreas Fischer (vocals, lyrics) and Tobias Emmerich (music, lyrics). After the two met on Facebook in mid-2019, the first songs were written and recorded in their home studio shortly afterwards.

Based on the indie sound aesthetics of the 80s by bands like The Smiths, Orange Juice, Cleaners from Venus and influenced by lyrics of German bands like Tocotronic, they’ve released two self-published EPs in 2020 (“Die Zärtlichkeit”, “Die Zärtlichkeit II”). Both EPs unexpectedly found national and international appeal in indie pop circles. German indie label Kleine Untergrund Schallplatten around Ronny Pinkau also became aware of Die Zärtlichkeit and their very first 7 inch single is now available: “France Gall / Montagmorgen”.

Glenn Donaldson has been making music since the late 1990s: as The Ivy Tree, as Jewelled Antler Collective in the early ‘00s, with Skygreen Leopards and Art Museums… with his conceptual instrumental project FWY!, or, more recently in his psych-folk collaboration with Jeremy Earl of Woods as Painted Shrines, with singer-songwriter Jem Fanvu in Vacant Gardens. Or with The Reds, Pinks, and Purples.
As The Reds, Pinks, and Purples, Donaldson makes indie pop in the late ’80s style, sketching out the simplest and sweetest of pop songs from the barest of elements: strummy guitar chords accented with occasional synth or Casio keyboard line, undercut by the gentle patter of a drum machine. His early The Reds, Pinks, and Purples tracks published on Bandcamp gained attention from many music blogs and Spain’s Pretty Olivia Records offered Donaldson to put them on a vinyl. Anxiety Art was born (in 2019). 
Just one year later English label Tough Love released You Might Be Happy Someday and Uncommon Weather is the third Red, Pinks, and Purples full-length again released by Tough Love and the Bay Area’s Slumberland Records.

^{Cheval Sombre (credit: Joakim Bengtsson)}

New York singer/songwriter Chris Porpora, aka Cheval Sombre emerged in the mid-2000s with his love for ’60s psychedelia, hypnotic space rock and folk balladry. Working closely with Spacemen 3’s Sonic Boom as well as Luna’s Dean Wareham, Cheval Sombre gained a cult following with his eponymous 2009 debut and 2012 follow-up, Mad Love. Since then he realized a record of outlaw country standards with Dan Wareham and now, 9 years after his second solo record, Cheval Sombre releases not one but two records: Time Waits For No One and Days Go By, both on the great label Sonic Cathedral.