Innholdsfortegnelse for October - November - December 2017 i Under the Radar

“Nothing is off limits. I think that’s what people should know.” This quote was given by Mackenzie Scott, artistically know as TORRES, in discussion of a particular lyric off her third album, Three Futures . But it very well could apply to Scott’s career as a whole. After the soft introspection of her 2013 self-titled debut as TORRES, Scott made an about face and released 2015’s Sprinter , a visceral album that was awash with heavy guitar and rage. And now, with Three Futures , she has changed course again with an album constructed around electronic beats and influenced by groups like Can, Kraftwerk, and Portishead. “Can and Kraftwerk were both bands that my touring bandmates really loved,”…

Tricky looks like he’s carved out of teak wood, his visible body parts scribbled with tattoos. He cuts an incongruous figure in Berlin, his home of the last two years. Once he starts holding forth about his adopted city, however, it sounds like he’s getting paid by the Berlin tourist board. It would seem that the Bristol, U.K. native has finally found the place in the world that works best for him. Living in London, New York, Los Angeles, Paris, and now Berlin has done nothing to temper Tricky’s West Country accent, which is as pronounced as it has ever been. He fluctuates between not speaking for long stretches of time to talking nonstop. What many don’t realize is how musically active Tricky is. From when he first came into…

To the naked eye, indie-pop duo Cults may have been off the radar for the past four years. Band members Brian Oblivion and Madeline Follin released their sophomore record Static back in 2013, which showed the band going into more experimental territory than 2011’s self-titled debut. But since then, the New York-based band have seemingly remained off the grid. While it might have seemed like Cults went radio silent, they were mostly focused on making music the whole time (when they weren’t trying to live like “normal human beings,” as Follin says). “There wasn’t a time we really took off or weren’t doing anything related to Cults,” explains Oblivion. “We were always working on the record, but we really took our time with it.” For Oblivion,…

“I s there something wrong with all of this, or is there something wrong with me?” Those are the sole lyrics to “New Deep,” the penultimate track on Everything Everything’s fourth album. As gentle piano anchors a sparse, airy soundscape, frontman Jonathan Higgs sings the lines over and over in his inimitable falsetto, voice and message front and center. It’s but a two-minute blip on an otherwise exuberant record, but it’s one that reflects Higgs’ headspace when writing A Fever Dream , the band’s most politically charged album to date. “There is a sensation that the old rules don’t apply anymore,” says Higgs. “It feels like we are at the end of some kind of age and a new one is about to begin, and in…

On his new album, Prince of Tears , Baxter Dury takes on a persona named Miami, and the results aren’t pretty. “Miami,” the four-and-a-half minute album opener, finds the British avant garde rocker (and son of the late, iconic 1970s/1980s singer/songwriter Ian Dury, of Ian Dury and the Blockheads fame) cursing, insulting, and grandstanding to no end against a nameless antagonist, sounding like id unbound, all over infectious, dancefloor ready beats and synths crafted by him and co-producer Ash Workman. “Miami is a delusional character I created to allow me to create a vehicle for free speech, to say the things I want to,” Dury explains. “I don’t necessarily believe it, but I wanted to say it. It’s a primal scream, just letting me let rip.”…

After 45 years and 25 albums, Sparks’ multi-instrumentalist Ron Mael admits that writing songs is no easier now than it was when he started making music in Los Angeles in 1968 with his little brother, Russell. Since then, they’ve been glam rockers (1974’s Kimono My House ), synth-pop pioneers (1979’s No. 1 in Heaven ), experimental minimalists (2002’s Lil’ Beethoven ), and cross-generational collaborators with Franz Ferdinand (2015’s FFS ). It has been an unusually long eight years since the last official Sparks full-length release, a 2009 radio drama written for Swedish radio entitled The Seduction of Ingmar Bergman , and the film-obsessed duo has spent much of the ensuing…

A palpable disappointment coursed through the communities of contemporary rock enthusiasm when Wolf Parade decided to part ways in 2010 after their third album, Expo 86 . They had romped around Canada’s unofficial eleventh province of boisterous progressive rock, swinging between the invigorating polarity of frontmen Spencer Krug and Dan Boeckner. With drummer Arlen Thompson and bassist Dante DeCaro billowing behind them, the combination tended to awaken the primal inhibitions of punk rock fandom circa 1980. So while the sting over their absence has been soothed through their continued individual pursuits, the music spectrum has been missing a force only felt when Wolf Parade was a pack. In their absence, hearts grew fonder and a fanbase that had expanded was over the moon last year when…

Alex Lahey is honest on her debut album I Love You Like a Brother . “I’ve gained weight and I drink too much, maybe that’s why you don’t love me as much,” she speculates on “I Haven’t Been Taking Care of Myself.” “Am I scared of losing you or am I scared to be alone?” she asks on the biting “Lotto in Reverse.” And then on the following track “Let’s Call It A Day,” a recounting of a relationship that was quick to fizzle, Lahey does not waver as she sings, “I don’t want to see where this could go.” It’s with the same steadiness that the Melbourne, Australian artist tells me how unconcerned she is about the candidness of her songwriting. “Why be ashamed of…

“With this record we realized that—individually, in some ways more than collectively—we had to come away from it feeling like we were able to express ourselves creatively within The Horrors,” says Faris Badwan. “If we came out of the record maybe thinking that we didn’t feel creatively satisfied, then we probably would have split up. You know, we’d made four records. We did pretty well. We’d been a band for 10 years. We could have easily quit and been happy with what we achieved.” Fortunately, quit they did not. The Horrors responded to their brief crisis of self-doubt with V, the English rockers’ fittingly titled fifth album. The band—singer Badwan, bassist Rhys Webb, guitarist Joshua Hayward, drummer Joe Spurgeon, and Tom Furse on keyboards—assembled at The Church Studios in London…

“It’s easy to be insecure about what you do because we’re all very self-conscious. We like to destroy things. It’s easy to put something out there and start to criticize it, but it’s harder to let go and make things without any sense of awareness about it.” Job satisfaction is never a concern for Sam Beam. The simplistic joy of musical expression he experienced recording as Iron & Wine for the first time is still the dominant feeling in the studio 15 years later. Perhaps it’s no surprise, then, that the vulnerability that marked those first few records is still front and center on his latest album, Beast Epic (on Sub Pop). More recent entries in the Iron & Wine catalog have been marked by sonic…

Musicians do interviews in person, over the phone, on video chat, and through email, but no one gets interviewed via fax (at least not anymore). For our new Just the Fax series we thought it’d be amusing to send our questions via a fax machine, with the artist hand writing the answers and faxing them back. This proves a bit tricky when an artist is on tour, but most motels still have fax machines in their business centers. Our first guinea pig is Amy Millan, co-vocalist for Montréal’s Stars (and also a member of Broken Social Scene). Stars formed way back in 2000, starting with co-vocalist Torquil Campbell and keyboardist Chris Seligman, who began recording their debut album, Nightsongs , in New York City in 1999 before their childhood friend…

He wasn’t exactly depressed before he formed Protomartyr, frontman Joe Casey says, but he didn’t have a lot to look forward to, either. Eight years later, he’s 40, and his band is ready to release its fourth LP, Relatives in Descent , its first on Domino. “[The band has] worked parts of my brain that I had kind of let go fallow for a while. It keeps me busy; it keeps me thinking about what’s going to happen tomorrow.” Casey is comfortable looking towards his future, but on stage, he takes off his glasses so he can’t see the crowd, or maybe so he can’t see the crowd seeing him. “It’s the worst possible mental image I could have,” he says. “I’ll wake up in a…

Even before they settled on an approach for writing and recording their sophomore album, Christie Simpson and her bandmates in the rising New Zealand synth pop troop Yumi Zouma knew what they wanted to avoid. “The goal is to not just be guys who are just being dudes, in another indie rock band, not being particularly groundbreaking,” she says with a playful chuckle about she and her bandmates’ determination to set Willowbank, their sophomore LP, apart. “So many festival lineups now are full of guys, in bands, being dudes. I don’t know if we avoid that, because I’m the only woman in the group, but our vibe is different.” It’d actually be downright tough to accuse Yumi Zouma of being generic, in large part because of Simpson’s soothing, fluttering voice.…

The age-old saying goes, “Absence makes the heart go fonder.” The four members of Melbourne, Australia’s Cut Copy are finding this particularly applicable to their current residential situation. Central figure, vocalist, keyboardist, and guitarist Dan Whitford decamped to Copenhagen, Denmark over a year ago, guitarist Tim Hoey is living in New York, bassist Ben Browning is in San Francisco, while drummer Mitchell Scott remains in Cut Copy’s hometown. It’s only work-related circumstances that bring the four together: recording, touring; but when they get together, it’s like a big reunion every time. It was an exceptionally intense reunion when they went to Atlanta to record their fifth album, Haiku From Zero , with Ben Allen (Animal Collective, Deerhunter, Neon Indian), who previously worked with Cut Copy when he mixed 2011’s Zonoscope…

Since 1996, Dan Bejar has released a large number of albums, both with his solo project Destroyer and as part of The New Pornographers and Swan Lake. Still, the Vancouver-based singer/ songwriter doesn’t see his extensive output as some kind of superlative accomplishment, his matter of fact descriptions of the process implying that making music is hard-baked into his daily life. “I’m not saying that it’s easy,” Bejar says from his home in Vancouver, expanding on the observation about his creative process with a rueful laugh. “It seems to get harder and harder. [Making music is] just a thing that I do. I don’t really reflect on it too much. When it’s time to put it out into the world, I’m basically forced to not reflect on it.” The statement…

It all circles back to The Smiths. Torquil Campbell, founder and co-vocalist for Stars, points to the band’s common affection for and connection to Morrissey and company as the fuel for their purposeful pop approach. It’s the reason Stars songs linger long after their three minutes are up; they’re musically synthetic but lyrically authentic. The world is broken. It’s also beautiful. And Campbell makes sure to acknowledge both sides of the coin. “You can draw the DNA of that back to our mutual love of The Smiths,” says Campbell. “I think the mutual feeling of what made The Smiths a special band brought Stars into a crystallized place right off the top. We were like, ‘We want to be a band that has the same influence on people that The…

Though much of the press Archy Marshall has received over the past five years has focused on the contrast between his boyish appearance and his mature, baritone voice, ask about the title of his new album and the 22-year-old Londoner becomes a kid again. The Ooz , his second full-length release under the King Krule moniker, represents a concept that has deep roots in Marshall’s creative life, stretching back to when he and his brother were making music as teenagers. Then going by the name Zoo Kid—one of Marshall’s many creative aliases over the years—he realized that those words read backwards created the rather unsavory sounding “Dik Ooz.” With that, a metaphor was born. Human beings are factories of waste, both biological and psychological, forced to…

Since Sean Baker’s film The Florida Project debuted at Cannes in late May, the superlatives have been abundant on the festival circuit. The much-anticipated follow-up to 2015’s Tangerine depicts a different side of marginalized society: Florida’s hidden homeless. The adults on the periphery pay weekly to stay at a seedy motel, leaving for one night per month so they don’t qualify as residents. Fortunately, they deal with the well-meaning Bobby (played by Willem Dafoe) as the motel manager, who makes life a little easier. The children follow along, blissfully unaware at how dire their situations may appear. “I make films in response to what I’m not seeing, and what I want to see more of. I want to see more diversity in…

“We’re all just an amalgamation of salt ions and that’s pretty cool,” Madeline Kenney says over the phone from her Oakland, California home. It’s not a line you’d necessarily expect to hear from a musician, but Kenney is hardly your average singer/songwriter. After studying Interpersonal Neurobiology at school and working for nine years as a professional baker, the Seattle native now nannies children and teaches voice and piano lessons. Oh, and she’s just released her stunning fuzzy pop debut of a record, Night Night at the First Landing , written, arranged, and recorded at home by her, and produced by Toro Y Moi’s Chaz Bear. Kenney is softly-spoken, and the conversation is full of nervous giggles from her side, though her answers are always thoughtful and articulate. This is not…

The cover of Wolf Alice’s second full-length release is striking in its simplicity. A young girl in an idyllic garden strikes a ballerina pose beside what appears to be the skull of a large animal. The girl stares off into the distance, expressionless and seemingly lost in thought. Tinged with both aspiration and melancholy, it serves as an appropriate image to pair with the sound of Visions of a Life , the band’s sometimes reflective, often defiant follow-up to their breakthrough debut, 2015’s My Love is Cool . For the members of Wolf Alice, the girl—who grew up to be the aunt of lead singer and songwriter Ellie Rowsellencapsulated the spirit of the album. “She was a kid and was playing some…

To conclude, we ask Emily Haines some questions about endings and death. Haines is perhaps best known as the lead vocalist for Metric, who formed in Toronto, Canada in 1998 and have released six albums, the most recent being 2015’s Pagans in Vegas . She’s also been a member of Broken Social Scene, most memorably singing “Anthems for a Seventeen-Year-Old Girl” on 2002’s You Forgot It in People , but also contributing to every album since, including this year’s Hug of Thunder . 2017 has also seen the release of Choir of the Mind, her long awaited second solo album, again credited to Emily Haines & The Soft Skeleton and the follow-up to 2006’s beloved solo debut, Knives…

“When bands reform, something in me resists listening to their comeback albums.” – Dean Wareham To most of our readers, Luna hopefully need no introduction. The band were a ’90s indie rock fixture until their public breakup in 2005, documented in the 2006 documentary film Tell Me Do You Miss Me? It’s not like they rested on their laurels during the decade they were gone, though. Songwriter/singer/guitarist Dean Wareham (formerly of late ’80s/early ’90s indie legends Galaxie 500) and his wife Britta Phillips (once the singing voice of Jem on the cult ’80s cartoon Jem and the Holograms and also a veteran of the ’90s bands Ultrababyfat and The Belltower) formed the duo Dean and Britta, releasing several albums of original…

A strange sort of math seems to underlie the chemistry of creativity. Any time two great artists are added to each other in equal measures, the product of their union almost always yields something less than what either of them could create on their own. On music’s periodic table, Courtney Barnett and Kurt Vile represent stable elements, two singer/songwriters who have refined their work to the point that they have become instantly recognizable and distinct creative personas. Putting them together in the same equation seems like a formula for too many ideas and not enough space for either artist to fully stretch out. But here, at least, the usual math breaks down. On Lotta Sea Lice , their nine-song collaboration, Barnett and Vile sound like two artists who have been…

A sophomore slump can be a self-fulfilling prophesy, or deliberate subterfuge by a band looking to reframe expectations, or often just a lazy way for rock critics to build narrative around a band’s second release. The idea is so engrained that following up a well-received debut can understandably cause jitters. Bully frontwoman Alicia Bognanno says she’s no different, and some nights of uneven sleep wait between the time of our interview in August and the release of her band’s new record, Losing . “I absolutely get anxiety nightmares in the middle of the night,” she says during a call from her home in Nashville. “The last four months, and until it’s going to be out in October, I always feel that way. When I write a…

The fall of 2016 was the best of times and the worst of times for the members of Deerhoof. Devastated by the election of Donald Trump, they simultaneously were experiencing the elation of doing their first tour of South America. In Brazil, where the government had just voted to impeach their president, they were greeted by unusually enthusiastic and celebratory crowds, with attendees dancing until the encore every night. That leg of the tour completed, as they waited for their flight back to the United States, multi-instrumentalist and songwriter Greg Saunier approached an airport employee. Their government was in chaos, their economy was in recession, and their murder rate was soaring. Why were people so happy? “And I asked her, ‘Isn’t this country going through a catastrophe right now? Why…

It has been six long years since Emil Svanängen released his last album as Loney dear, 2011’s Hall Music . In the interim, Svanängen has endured much change, suffering ends to relationships both personal and professional and ultimately finding himself at an artistic crossroads, one that informs Loney dear’s seventh album, the self-titled Loney dear . “I was in a long relationship with a girl that ended after 12 years, and I stopped working with the manger that kicked the whole thing started for me,” says Svanängen, who also cut ties with his previous record label, Polyvinyl. For Loney dear , Svanängen signed to Peter Gabriel and WOMAD’s Real World Records after Gabriel himself heard the album track “Hull” through a mutual…

Benjamin Clementine’s life story is absorbing to the point of distraction. Born and raised in London to a family of Ghanaian descent, the self-taught musician emerged from school with almost no qualifications, fell out with his family, and ended up living homeless in London and Paris. It was in the French capital he started down the road that took him to winning the Mercury Prize for his debut At Least for Now in 2015. Now he’s back keeping the attention on his music with sophomore effort I Tell a Fly , using the device of two flies looking in on the world as an excuse to engage with issues from bullying to war-torn Aleppo. Previous success hasn’t stopped the striving. Speaking over the phone, he’s quick…

A volunteer for a transgender help hotline. A young black woman struggling with the facets of race in America. Patrons at an Orlando, Florida venue with a proud rainbow logo on the door. These are but a few of the gig attendees who approached indie rock troubadour Ted Leo to share moving stories during the string of shows he began playing on Nov. 9, 2016. That was, of course, a significant date because it was the day after the fateful presidential election of Donald Trump. The post gig conversations Leo had with fans helped solidify one of his longest held mantras, which he scrawled on a sign for Under the Radar : “Straight white cis men: It’s O.K. to just shut up and just listen.” “I hesitate to say too…

As if it isn’t impressive enough to be a Saturday Night Live alum, or steal scenes from star comic Aziz Ansari as the main love interest in season one of his series Master of None , Noël Wells is now marking grander milestones. With the new film Mr. Roosevelt , the 30-year-old artsy San Antonian has instantly become a triple threat: Leading lady. Screenwriter. Director. Not that she’s letting any of it go to her head. During a phone interview about the film (in which Wells plays Emily, an aspiring actress returning from a stint of trying to make it big in Los Angeles to Austin, Texas, in order to meet up with her ex for the funeral…

“I ’m so over opening for other people,” Moses Sumney tells me over tea, eggs, and waffles in a cafe in London’s Chalk Farm. With his knife he’s poking his poached eggs, so wrinkly “they look like old people,” he says. The Los Angeles musician has toured with James Blake and Sufjan Stevens, works with Grizzly Bear’s Chris Taylor, and features on Solange Knowles’ “Mad,” alongside Lil Wayne. Now it’s time for him to focus on his own work, his debut full-length LP Aromanticism . The album name and theme came from a late-night Internet research session. “I asked ‘Siri, what should my album be about?’ And Siri was like ‘write about this thing nobody has written about,’” he laughs. “And you know, Siri is our…

Phoebe Bridgers always wanted to be a singer. The 22-year-old Pasadena, CA native recently released her debut album, Stranger in the Alps , but it seems that she has spent her whole life preparing for this. She played her first open mic night at 13, opened for Peter Case (of The Nerves and The Plimsouls) when she was 14, and graduated from the prestigious Los Angeles County High School for the Arts in 2013. “When I was a teenager, my mom would wait outside of gigs to drive me home before I could drive,” she says. For Bridgers, music was always in her bones. “My first real concert was Neil Young,” says Bridgers, recalling her early musical inspirations and the music that filled her home as…

“For a couple of years I would use my sick days for touring, or I would not tell anyone that I was in this band. And now it’s like I can’t even do that. Right now, at one of my other jobs, my boss is actually a Downtown Boys fan.” – Victoria Ruiz In this new series, Parental Guidance, Under the Radar listens in as a musician’s parent interviews them. For the inaugural edition, Lupe Aguinaga interviews her daughter, Downtown Boys’ vocalist Victoria Ruiz, along with the band’s guitarist, Joey La Neve DeFrancesco, about how the life of a band changes as they reach bigger stages, and how they would change the music business, if they could. Downtown Boys’ new album, Cost of Living (their…

Julien Baker doesn’t hide her excitement. At the end of the first of two 75-minute interviews, I mention that Under the Radar is pleased to feature her on our cover, not realizing that this is news she is hearing for the first time. “Woah! Really?” she replies, her voice filled with incredulity. “Oh, my goodness. Wow. Okay! Cool. That’s super cool,” she says, pausing as if to give me one more chance to reveal the prank. “My goodness.” Given the disarmingly unguarded nature of her songwriting, such a response probably shouldn’t be a surprise. Baker is anything but circumspect. Two years after her Sprained Ankle became one of the most-acclaimed debuts of 2015, Baker is still getting accustomed to the fact that she has listeners, let…