London based singer-songwriter, Ned Roberts, has three studio records to his name –Ned Roberts (2014), Outside My Mind (2017) and Dream Sweetheart (2020)- and has featured frequently on BBC 6 Music, BBC Radio 2 and BBC Radio Scotland. His bittersweet songs sit comfortably among the classics of the Laurel Canyon era, with a timeless quality and a poetic turn of phrase. With shows across Europe and America, live highlights include a tour with celebrated songwriter Anais Mitchell, plus support slots for Joe Pug, Micah P. Hinson, Those Pretty Wrongs, and Sarabeth Tucek amongst others. Two of his critically acclaimed albums were out for the Aveline label (home to Ani Di Franco), and he has a decade long creative partnership with renowned US producer and songwriter Luther Russell (Sarabeth Tucek, Fabiano do Nascimento). Ned has just released his fourth studio album, Heavy Summer. Teaming up again with producer Luther Russell, and sound engineer Jason Hiller, the record was cut and mixed in 6 days in the late LA summer heat. Recorded mostly live to a vintage 8-track tape machine, Luther (keys, mellotron, guitars, drums) and Jason (bass) doubled as an expert band. Heavy Summer showcases both sides of Ned’s creative output, with gorgeously constructed band takes, recorded during the heat of the day, and intimate acoustic numbers, recorded just as night drew in. Throughout, there is a sense of searching, of something just beyond reach. “Days into days / a uniform parade / Run ‘cross the fields / is salvation on the way? / To ease the sense of time / Go steady on the wine / I’m young and I’m old / I’m living and I’m dying.’ Solo acoustic closer, The Breakers, with Sarabeth Tucek on backing vocals, brings the record to a meditative end.

Katy Pinke is a Manhattan-based singer-songwriter, painter and actor and her self-titled debut album is out now on the new Glamour Gowns label. The songs on her album possess a direct and inviting quality, but within each, a quiet battle is being waged in an ongoing struggle to, as Pinke puts it, “unconditionally love a fragmented self.” The album strips Pinke’s art down to its absolute essence. At the home studio of Phil Weinrobe (Adrianne Lenker, Cass McCombs), she recorded her vocals and minimal guitar accompaniments live with drummer Jeremy Gustin in front of an audience of a few friends. The idea was to capture the energy of Pinke’s live shows—storied events in the NYC indie rock scene. Katy’s music is best described as experimental folk, inspired by the odd song structures and conversationality of artists like Bill Callahan and Aldous Harding with a lithe vocal delivery reminiscent of The Roches and Connie Converse. She’s a really respected figure in the NYC scene and she also regularly plays in Delicate Steve’s band. The record’s most devastating moments are sometimes also its most fun (“Tomato,” “One Coin”). Elsewhere, there are bittersweet moments of effortless beauty (“Grapefruit,” “Strawman”). In Pinke’s music, life sometimes feels like a series of pushes into a vast, hopeful unknown, and the time spent conserving our energy in between them. All we can do, she hypothesizes, is try to stay in tune with ourselves while waiting for the next opportunity to try again.

Eric Kinlaw (Vocals/Guitar/Bass/Sound Design) and Marcus Barfield (Production/Sound Design) are forceghost, an electronic psych duo based out of Augusta, GA. Both members sport a long list of previous bands and projects, but are elated to be bringing forceghost into its fullest realization. After their initial formation in 2019, time and circumstance have led to the reshaping of the band into its current form. forceghost is the product of impromptu jam sessions, free form experimentation, and friendship. Many years of musical evolution and collaboration between the duo have culminated into a sound both piercingly focused, and kaleidoscopic in scope and texture. Creamy guitars, soaring synths, sharp drums, and hauntingly beautiful vocals will leave the listener enveloped in a radiant afterglow. All previous recordings have fallen by the wayside. Their debut EP, unknowing the known, is outnow and it is the definitive starting point for forceghost: the band hopes listeners find themselves enriched by its listening.

A bit more than a decade ago, Josephine McRobbie and Joseph O’Connell met in Bloomington, Indiana. McRobbie played in a host of local bands and O’Connell had released many albums of exploratory folk as Elephant Micah. When the mood struck them, they recorded music together. Spacious, patient, and strange music, to be sure–drawing a line, as the crow flies, between the high lonesome cowboy-folk of the American west and the whisper-soft Welsh post-punk of Young Marble Giants…or, perhaps, a bit of Nancy and Lee and a dash of Ira and Georgia. Gibson & Toutant isn’t just a musical project, but an attempt to document the interstices of Josephine and Joe’s life together–starting as a home recording and voice memo project for their own amusement. Their songs emerge quickly, from a collaborative process in which one of them literally finishes the other’s thoughts. As they traveled and established a new home base in Durham, North Carolina, their music rooted them. Gibson & Toutant was derived from McRobbie and O’Connell’s mothers’ maiden names, and they titled the songs on their debut EP after the rockabilly lyrics of McRobbie’s late uncle. Gibson & Toutant is DIY roots music, if, along with the more tangled and earthen variety, we acknowledge that fiber optic cables pulse with life deep under the soil, and they get twisted into one another if kept in close proximity for too long. At times, a dusky Lynchian surrealism surfaces in Gibson & Toutant’s music, as if those omnipresent electric hums surrounding modern humans are transmissions from another dimension, waiting to be harnessed. At others, G&T simply evoke dozing off with the calm drone of broadcast snow emanating from a Motel 6 TV. Perhaps what we’re hearing in this music is the sound of the roots that have grown between two humans who live and work in the same physical space, grasping at the ubiquitous electronic pulses surrounding them, waiting to be heard.