File under: Unnerving, serrated-edged, spacious art-punks who love dissonance and contrast

For fans of: Teenage Jesus & the Jerks, Sonic Youth, Arab Strap, Xiu Xiu, The Birthday Party

From: Omaha, Nebraska

Personae: Jack Begley (guitar, vocals), Noah Sterba (guitar, vocals), Jeff Sedrel (bass), Kevin Donahue (drums)

Yuppies took a very long time to make their first album — the band formed in 2007 and has released a handful of singles and a split EP over the past few years, but their self-titled, full-length debut has just appeared on Parquet Courts’ label Dull Tools. It’s a terrifically unsettling record, flowing from quiet, spacious passages (with main vocalist Jack Begley muttering or chanting lyrics that sound like every phrase is in a separate set of quotation marks) to out-of-control punk slaloms like “Hitchin a Ride,” which Noah Sterba screams so hard his voice cracks. And the band’s years of playing together are evident in the way they run every song into the next, without a pause.

There’s a lot of history audible on Yuppies — the atonal hammer-and-release textures and shambling rhythms of some of these songs echo the late ’70s no wave scene, and Begley and Sterba’s voices recall the Midwestern punk rock of the ’80s. But it’s also an assured, startling take on the psychogeography of the Dust Belt landscape that spawned the band. “All right, all right, we’re going for a ride, whether you like it or not,” Begley snaps at the beginning of “A Ride,” and that’s Yuppies’ attitude, right there.

eMusic’s Douglas Wolk talked with Sterba as the band geared up for a month-long tour.

On the band’s origins in high school corridors:

Me, Kevin and Jack all grew up together. In high school, I was writing songs, and Jack was writing songs, and we knew Kevin played drums, so we started playing together. Our earliest stuff was very primitive and…”young.” We were learning to play our instruments as we were playing songs. As we’ve gone on, we’ve kind of gotten more competent. We graduated from high school in 2007, and then in probably 2010, Jeff joined — we’d just been guitars and drums, and we thought, “Oh man — we gotta have some low end!”

On geographical separation and making their first album after six years:

Jeff lives in Virginia now, and Jack lived in St. Louis for a year or two. We’ve only had two or three years of being in the same city as a band. But once we got Jeff, we couldn’t play with anyone else. Even if after this tour we can’t play for another year, we won’t stop being a band — we’ll just kind of try to work with what we have and where we are.

The album’s definitely been a long time coming. One or two of the songs on the album we’ve had for four or five years; there are a few that we’ve thrown out, then reclaimed and put on the record. Most of the songs flow together, but I’d almost say that’s not something we consciously did — we’ve had a lot of space between times when we could practice, so the songs form their relationship with each other. Which is pretty cool.

On their nonstop live sets and how that translated to the recording:

Our shows are high-energy and anxiety-ridden. There are a lot of moments of chaos. We don’t take any breaks between songs, although we’ve got a bunch of different sets. We don’t have very long attention spans; we try to push ourselves to do new things at every show. The first side of the album we did in one long take. We recorded it live except for the vocals, and we thought, “This could take all day if we keep fucking it up 15 minutes in,” but we got the whole thing in one take. The second side we did in two parts — the first few songs run together, and then the last two.

On “What’s That?”:

That was one of the coolest songs to be a part of. We never talked about the writing of that song, we just started playing, said, “That’s kinda cool!,” practiced it again and started playing it at shows. When it started out, it was so different from how it turned out on the record. We never once talked about the structure of the song until the day before we recorded it. It was a bizarre process to be part of, watching this thing form itself.

On what they do when they’re not being Yuppies:

Kevin and I play with Simon Joyner — I’ve been playing with him for three or four years, Kevin just joined the group this year. We just made a new record and it’s awesome — more of an experimental record than Simon’s ever done. Simon lent me a space with an 8-track, and I recorded a solo album where I play all the instruments — that was released on Unread Records. Jack had a solo tape close to a year ago. And Kevin and I work at a diner that our friend owns in Omaha. Jack also works in a restaurant, and Jeff works in a restaurant in Richmond.

On the band’s favorite reactions to their music:

I’ve had a lot of people come up to me after a show and say, “It was good, but it made me feel really weird.” To be able to conjure up an emotion in someone, just from the sounds we’re making — to be able to create a feeling and have them really feel it too — that’s so flattering to me.

File under: Dour but hooky jangle-pop with a decidedly Anglophilic edge

For fans of: The Smiths, The Housemartins, The Lucksmiths, The Go-Betweens

From: Brooklyn, by way of Florida, by way of Connecticut

Personae: Andrew Marr (vocals/guitar), Jared O'Connel (bass), John Barinaga (guitar), Jake Beal (drums)

Ski Lodge’s debut Big Heart opens with a jangle and a pout, a tumble of giddy guitars, a handclap drum track and frontman Andrew Marr sighing, “You don’t have to be like me/ You don’t have to make the same mistakes.” And while the go-to easy critical reference point for this Brooklyn band has been another band with a Marr in it, Big Heart is more than a mere Manchester mimeograph. Its songs sway and sashay, guitars wreathing the edges like fine lace on velvet shirt sleeves. But all that frilliness masks a bruised heart: Throughout Big Heart, Marr laments his inability to connect with lovers and friends and his frustrations with his own shortcomings.

eMusic’s editor-in-chief met up with Marr at a New York coffee shop to talk about Florida, emotional alienation and the perils of teenage drug culture.

On the early influence of the Grateful Dead:

I was in a jam band in high school. We did a lot of Grateful Dead and Phish songs. I started to sing a little bit for the first time in that band. I still respect the Grateful Dead. I was obsessed with them for a while, then I went through a phase where I started listening to more indie music and thought, “Well, I can’t really like the Grateful Dead and Phish if I’m liking this other music.” I’m kind of getting over that now, and realizing that they were great songwriters, and that it doesn’t have to be one or the other. I think a lot of the distaste for those bands has to do with the type of people who like that music and not the music itself. I mean, have you ever been to a Phish show? It’s such a ridiculous scene.

On the downside of growing up in a wealthy community:

I grew up in Greenwich, Connecticut. It’s pretty suburban — it’s about 45 minutes from New York. It’s a pretty wealthy town — that’s usually why people have heard of it, though my family wasn’t super wealthy. It was a great place to grow up, but it’s kind of fucked up also. Kids there just have access to a lot of money. There are a lot of drugs, and that had a big impact on me. High school basically revolved around doing drugs and trying to do as little school work as possible. I was fully in it. I started by just experimenting [with drugs] with friends in middle school — a lot of my friends had older brothers, so it was just out of curiosity mainly. But then I just fell into that group of people, and that was just what we did. It got bad. I crashed a couple cars, so my parents kind of caught on after that. [Pause.] They were their cars.

On being exiled in Florida:

I went there for rehab — I think a lot of people end up there for the same reason — and then I just got stuck there. I started in Del Rey Beach and then moved a little north to the West Palm Beach area. I was there for four years. I didn’t really like anything about it, to be honest. I just kind of stuck around because I couldn’t really get my shit together. A year or two before I moved up here I finally got a band together and we played out a little bit down there. The scene there, there’s just not much going on. Touring bands don’t really visit there much. Miami has a pretty good venue, but it’s just way out of the way from where I was. I saw Radiohead while I was down there, but not really much else.

On his slow departure from the jam-band scene:

A friend of mine played [Death Cab for Cutie's] “I Will Follow You into the Dark” on guitar one time, and he was singing it, and I was like, “That’s an awesome song — who sings that?” And he told me. And I got really into Plans and Transatlanticism, and I listened to them a lot. That was the first band in that world. I got into the Shins right around that same time, too. So then when I was in Florida, I was writing a lot of Death Cab-inspired songs on the piano and just recording them into my laptop. At some point I was just like, “I want to start writing on the guitar — I’m kind of missing this whole other feel.” So I started messing around with it on my own and wrote songs based on my ability. As I’ve gotten better on the guitar, my songs have gotten a little more advanced than they were initially.

On songwriting as biography, and therapy:

None of the songs on Big Heart were narratives about other people. I’m more of a biographer. I get these little snippets of ideas and I try to piece them all together. “Anything to Hurt You” is just about being a bad influence on somebody else — looking at my mistakes, and saying to someone else that they don’t have to go through the same shit. And the title track is about a death, a figurative death. I’ve always had a hard time connecting with people — both knowing what other people are thinking and telling people what I’m thinking. Songwriting is a way for me to speculate on what relationships are really like, or what another person’s intentions were when I really have no idea. So the title track is a personal song about my inability to open up to people — in relationships, specifically. My girlfriend used to say I had no heart. And she was fucking around with me, but that’s what inspired me to think, “What does it feel like to not have a heart? And what does it feel like to open yourself up but then have your heart crushed?” That song for me is about the struggle between closing yourself off to everything versus opening yourself up and dealing with pain. I’ve gotten better — I’m going to therapy, and I’ve gotten better at telling people what’s going on in my life, but before that I was totally closed off. So I think songwriting is a useful tool for me. It’s part of my process.

File under: No-wave hardcore; harmony meets disharmony in an unpadded cell; the sound a Kathy Acker novel would make if it was a band instead of a book

For fans of: Free Kitten, Arab On Radar, Destroy All Monsters, Scissor Girls, Magik Markers

From: Oakland, California

Personae: Marissa Magic (guitar, vocals), Jaime Clark (drums), Vanessa Harris (guitar, vocals)

Oakland’s Stillsuit mix experimental noise rock with punk politics, creating a feminist soundtrack to the confusion of sex and violence in a gendered world. Loud treble guitars in weird tunings duel while drums pound away in another time signature. Their live show lays waste to squares who cover their ears, clear the room and even pull the plug.

Stillsuit is the best band in America, and their legitimacy is not predicated on outside approval. Like all great underground groups, they make up their own rules. Listen and learn.

On noise vs. punk:

Marissa Magic: Sometimes I describe us as noise-rock, but I also kind of hate that [term].

Vanessa Harris: [Noise] is where a lot of my personal history lies, but it can be limiting. My conception of a punk band means that you care about things. I want to be explicitly feminist and care about the ways in which we do things. We are a punk band in that sense, but maybe we don’t totally sound like one.

On moving beyond the “man/woman” show and intersectional feminism in 2013:

Jaime Clark: The feminist scene in the Bay Area isn’t just about women or cisgendered women, it’s about gender-non-conforming people and people of color. It also considers class dynamics and so many aspects of people’s backgrounds that are not necessarily directly related to gender.

Harris: There’s also a lot of non-feminist punk stuff that’s going on too and that can be a bummer — some of those “man/woman” shows that happen —

Clark: — as in, “men” and “women” are at the show, and that’s it —

Harris: And they are very much acting out roles that are traditional. Being in consideration of all those things is what good feminism is. What inspires me about feminism is that it can encompass anything. It should be asking questions about race, class, gender, queer — I don’t know, everything.

Magic: Sometimes we get asked to play bigger noise shows and we are the only women on the bill — or it will be, like, very man/woman situations — I think it’s important to play those shows but it can be challenging.

On what they dislike most in popular music:

Magic: I don’t like music that sounds like it’s made by hippies on cocaine. Like ELO, Steely Dan — I just hate groovy-talented-guys doing groovy-talented-things in really expensive studios and everything sounds slick. Also a thing that bums me out is that a lot of the music I really like sonically is either lyrically or aesthetically really fucked up.

Clark: Generally I dislike Bruce Springsteen and I dislike “Don’t Stop Believing” — things that are sort of like “songs for every guy out there.” Also, drums or percussion really make or break a band for me. I don’t like music where it feels like whatever percussion has no life. I like a lot of music that has drum machines or pre-recorded beats, as long as it seems like life got put into creating it.

Harris: I hate ’80s synths. I hate the new ’80s noise dudes doing ’80s synth-music thing. It’s so unappealing to me. I love Steely Dan. I don’t like Journey, but I like Boston. But I would pay money if I never had to hear that song “You Spin Me Right Round” again.

Magic: The other day she said “I would pay $5 to never hear that song again.”

Harris: Yeah, I don’t care that much. But I could do without it.

File under: Carefree bangers for a girls' night out

From: Stockholm, Sweden

Personae: Caroline Hjelt and Aino Jawo

Thanks to both canny use in a pivotal scene of the HBO show Girls and a memorable cover by Sesame Street‘s Cookie Monster, Icona Pop reached mega-fame months before even releasing their debut album. Their scorching dancefloor stomper “I Love It,” penned by dark pop songstress Charli XCX, has been practically inescapable since its first appearance on the internet last May. The duo’s meteoric rise is all the more impressive given that Caroline Hjelt and Aino Jawo come from a DIY background, and thus handle their own maximalist production on This Is…Icona Pop.

Despite these bragging rights, Hjelt and Jawo remain relatable, using their high-profile debut to promote girl power — just like their collaborator Charli XCX did on True Romance. Their record is full of shout-along songs that are more focused on friendship than romance. While other artists might have struggled with their newfound fame, Icona Pop rose to the challenge of following up their breakout single with a batch of songs that are just as catchy.

eMusic’s Marissa G. Muller phoned Hjelt — Jawo was out sick — to talk about writing empowering songs, how their hippie families informed their wide-ranging musical influences, and how they opened up their sound for a larger audience.

“I Love It” is the perfect example of a post-breakup party song.

It’s a very angry song with a lot of emotions, but it’s also kind of empowering. When you’re singing “I Love It/ I don’t care,” it feels like you’re leaving something behind. When you break up with someone, you get devastated and you think that you’re never going to smile again and you just want to stay in bed. But then there’s one day where you feel a little bit stronger, a little bit better, then you get into the “fuck it” mode, and the “I love it” mode. You’re like, “I don’t care anymore, I love it.”

Did you try to sustain the feel of that song on this album?

We have some songs that are still empowering and have the same vibe, but the album isn’t 15 songs that sound exactly like “I Love It.” The people that found out about us through that song will get to see some new sides of ours.

What are some of those sides?

We take it down a little on a few songs. Some people just know us for “I Love It” and we’ve been writing this album during a lot of different states of mind and in a lot of different cities. You get the whole of us. Not just one feeling, one emotion, one state of mind.

We’ve been working on this album for such a long time and we’re so proud of it. We just want to show people what we’ve been up to over the past four years. We want to make music that makes people feel so we hope that people feel a lot of emotions from this album.

What was the biggest challenge you faced when you were putting together the album?

Time and the logistics. We’ve been so inspired and have written so much music. We joked that we have maybe five albums worth of songs to release. But it takes awhile to kill your darlings and find the songs that really connect. So that was the hardest part — not writing or creating it, just finding the time to finish it. Starting a song is easy, but finishing it can take some time.

Did you and Aino set out to write empowering songs, or is that something that happened along the way?

When we go into the studio we never think, “Today, we’re going to write a song about this.” We just go in there and it’s our little Icona Pop world and we create based on how we feel that day. Or maybe we’ve been through something, or maybe our friends told us a story that inspired us, or maybe we rode the bus with someone who inspired us. But then I think, it needs to reflect who we are and how we feel together, and we feel very strong together. I think that’s where the message comes from. We are all about girl power because we feel the girl power.

You’re one of the few pop artists right now spreading that message.

Thank you. That makes me happy.

Who are some of the artists you looked up to growing up, and while you were writing?

We grew up in hippie families where we listened to everything from reggae to classical music. When we started Icona Pop, we were so inspired by Prince and David Bowie. We’ve also looked up a lot to PJ Harvey, Tina Turner, Beyoncé, Patti Smith — really strong female artists that are so great at what they’re doing.

That’s a really expansive group. Were you hoping to bring as much eclecticism on the album?

Yeah, I feel like we do that all of the time. We don’t have any rules when we write and we really feel like we can do whatever we want in the studio and call it our pop music. We can go into the studio and can do a reggae song but we can also write an EDM song. There’s a lot of mixed genres on our pop album.

You’ve found a spot in the indie crowd but you’ve also opened up your sound and it’s such a big part of mainstream right now. Why do you think your music appeals to such a wide array of people?

When we’re having a show, we’ve been having old biker guys come up to us and say, “I usually don’t listen to pop music but I love your music,” and then we have the cutest little girl standing in the front being at her first concert, or boys that are singing every lyric. It’s such a mix and that makes us so happy. I think people can relate to our music a lot because we’re not trying to be cooler than we are or anything — it’s just us doing what we love. We’re two normal girls from Sweden, and I think people can feel that it’s genuine and real.

File under: Co-ed indie pop with roots in noise, hardcore and punk

For fans of: Tiger Trap, The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart, Huggy Bear, Veronica Falls

From: Cardiff, Wales

Personae: Alanna McArdle (vocals), Owen Williams (vocals, guitar), George Nicholls (guitar), Max Warren (bass), Dave Sandford (drums)

Some bands meet in record shops and some meet through Craigslist ads, but Owen Williams bonded with his future Joanna Gruesome band mates at a rather unusual place: an anger management group. “If you just piss off a lot of teachers you get into those kinds of groups,” he explains. “A lot of the time they kind of draft you in through school.”

After initially forming late 2010, Joanna Gruesome cycled through a series of different sounds — including a twee phase that Williams says was a reaction to all of the ’80s hardcore they were listening to — before settling on both a permanent lineup and a style defined by its contrasts: Moments of winsome indie (mostly courtesy of ex-Evans The Death member Alanna McArdle’s lilting vocals) and exuberant noise-pop hove up against discordant, aggressive sounds equally indebted to riot grrrl, hardcore and fuzzy ’90s lo-fi.

As befitting their diverse influences, Joanna Gruesome cut their teeth touring with local indie outfits as well as what Williams calls “chaotic emo bands,” releasing 7-inches on underground labels Art Is Hard and Happy Happy Birthday To Me. Such activity — as well as riotous live shows that often involved band members jumping into the crowd as they played — pushed Joanna Gruesome to the forefront of the UK DIY scene and caught the eye of another label they admired, Fortuna POP! That label plans to release Joanna Gruesome’s first full-length, Weird Sister, in Europe (Slumberland is handling the US duties).

Annie Zaleski talked with Williams about their so-called anger issues, Weird Sister‘s dark crevices and whether their band name is really about you-know-who.

On how Nation Of Ulysses figured into their formation:

[Bassist] Max [Warren] turned up [to anger management one day] wearing, like, a Nation Of Ulysses bootleg T-shirt. That surprised me. That gave me a reason to go talk to him. I was like, “I love that band,” so we started talking. And he told me he played bass, so that’s that.

On their sloppier (and twee) early years:

It was a completely different lineup then as well, and we kind of existed in living rooms — and [played] really bad Field Mice covers and stuff like that. [Laughs.] It was pretty twee, to be honest. It wasn’t the kind of exciting music [we do now].

On how ex-Evans The Death bassist Alanna McArdle landed in the band:

Our original singer went off to live in Africa, so we needed a new singer. And we knew Alanna through this band called Playlounge that she was really good friends with. We knew she was in Evans the Death and we knew she could sing. She’s been great.

On their enduring love of DIY:

We played with a lot of cool DIY bands in Wales and England, like Facel Vega and Harbour. There were a lot of hardcore bands, really. Then we got into stuff like Huggy Bear, Tiger Trap [and] the Frumpies, and poppier stuff like Young Marble Giants.

On writing Weird Sister at a creepy Brighton, UK, hotel called Hell House:

We didn’t record there, but I kind of wrote the music there with some of the other band members. It was really weird; it was this sort of like kind of strange little hippie-ish hotel with these really odd guys who kept doing Ouija Boards and stuff like that. We didn’t really know what they were doing — hopefully they conjured something. We just hung out there for like a month and wrote all the songs.

On why their lyrics are so dark:

I really like the Alan Moore Batman comic. I was reading [the dark and highly influential Batman graphic novel] The Killing Joke a lot when I was thinking about lyrics. It’s got a zombie vibe, it’s sort of set in a circus and there’s loads of horrible things coming alive, and the joke is they’re screaming about shit.

I’ve never really thought about the lyrics too much. A lot of it’s just quite abstract. A lot of it’s just about crap horror movies and things. It kind of is from just being emotionally detached and just sort of purely this kind of horror-y [thing]. Some of it is about mental illness and stuff — I guess being in that hotel was quite an emotional atmosphere.

On their weirdest gig ever:

This is our second tour, but it’s still pretty early days. It was this show in a middle aged couple’s suburban home, because their kid had recovered from meningitis. They wanted some bands to play in the house. And we were on tour and were like, “Oh, we need a date.” And then he messaged us saying, “Come and play a house show here.” The guy [who booked us] was into [the] ’90s rock kind of thing, and somehow had heard of us. I remember he was wearing a Lemonheads T-shirt. We didn’t really know much about him.

We ended up with children running everywhere. It was really, really bizarre. It was probably the worst and the best show.

On the origins of their name:

It’s a play on Joanna Newsom. We couldn’t think of a name at first when we first started, and we didn’t really think anything would happen. Our friend Al, who’s now our manager, was suggesting loads of stupid pun names, and I think Joanna Gruesome stuck somehow. Then we just never decided to change it. It’s kind of a lot of bother, really. I always kind of forget it’s an awful pun. I think she’s aware of it. I have a feeling she is.

On Cardiff:

It’s weird, because I guess compared to somewhere — like, I don’t know, Manchester or London — there’s a very tiny amount of bands. In Cardiff, everyone knows each other, so everyone’s kind of helping each other step up.

File under: Bewitching, minimalist R&B that's part Kraftwerk, part coldwave

For fans of: Ikonika, Cooly G, Junior Boys, Kraftwerk

From: Hamilton, Ontario

Personae: Jessy Lanza, Jeremy Greenspan

Jessy Lanza’s debut album, Pull My Hair Back, strikes a careful balance of hot and cold. On the one hand, there are songs like “Fuck Diamond,” “Against the Wall” and the title track, not to mention a general air of R&B at its most suggestive: heavy lids and bated breath and scraps of discarded clothing paving the way to the feather bed. But someone must have left the window open, because an icy chill hangs over everything. Lanza and co-producer Jeremy Greenspan, of Junior Boys, favor cool analog synthesizers and crisp vintage drum machines, overlaying jittery R&B grooves with an eerie sheen that’s part Kraftwerk, part coldwave. In the midst of it all, channeled through delicate electronic processing, Lanza’s breathy voice fills the room like so many tendrils of dry ice.

That such a slinky, ethereal sound should find a home on Kode 9′s Hyperdub label might seem odd, given the imprint’s emphasis on twisted, hard-charging club music. But, taken alongside Cooly G’s 2012 album Playin’ Me and Ikonika’s recent Aerotropolis, Pull My Hair Back confirms Hyperdub’s standing as a conduit for unusual new mutations in R&B.

eMusic’s Philip Sherburne spoke with Lanza over Skype from her home in Hamilton, Ontario; she talked about vintage synths, the perils of a musical upbringing and Jed the Dancing Guy.

On Hamilton, Ontario:

It’s a weird city, for sure. At one point it used to be thriving. There was a lot of steel here; it’s kind of like Pittsburgh. But now the steel industry does maybe 20 percent of what it used to. There are a lot of really impoverished parts of Hamilton, but in the past five years there’s been a sort of revival. A lot of people from Toronto move here because it’s less expensive. Musically, there’s a lot of cool stuff going on, because usually people in Hamilton don’t really care what’s going on outside Hamilton. There’s a great music scene, which is what I really like about it. And it’s not expensive to live, which is great.

On the vintage synthesizers bequeathed to her by her late father:

You can play jazz chords on the piano and they sound pretty cheesy, but put them on a PolyMoog, and they sound awesome. It was only when I met Jeremy and we started working on tracks that it started to come together. He’s like, “I want to hang out with you and use the stuff in your studio!”

On her musical training:

I did classical stuff when I was a teenager. I did Royal Conservatory piano and I took classical singing lessons, but I don’t really think of myself as being a trained singer. There are soul singers that I really idolize, like Evelyn Champagne King or Candi Staton — they just have crazy perfect voices. I can’t sing like them. I just try to do what I can, you know?

On trying to forget her musical training:

I have to turn off the part of my brain that’s like, “If you do this seventh chord and it resolves to this one…” All those techniques. Jazz music’s kind of the first pop music — all the structures are there. And I have to work hard not to make things fucking cheesy and terrible. That’s the one thing I have to try to avoid: using too many of the chord progressions I learned in school. Fighting not to make it too obvious is the thing I’m always trying to do. Jeremy’s big into chords, though. He likes a good chord.

On her use of melisma:

I think that’s just from listening to, like, one Aaliyah song for 10 years. It kind of sinks into your brain and it’s just there to fall back on. When I was growing up, I listened to mainstream R&B. I really like old R&B, 2000s R&B, all different kinds of R&B. All the varieties of R&B!

On lyrics and meaning:

I find writing lyrics really hard. I really hate the sound of lyrics that I’ve written. If I think about them too much, it sounds so labored and really unnatural. A lot of times I do a whole bunch of vocal takes, and then I listen back to them the next day, and I’m like, “Fuck, I have no idea what I’m saying, but I really like the way it sounds, so I’m just going to keep it.” I try not to think too much about having something that was really cohesive or that I had thought about deeply for days on end, or pontificating on some subject…I try not to think too much about it, and just use what sounds right in that musical moment. That sounds fuckin’ cheesy, but whatever.

On the album’s sexual slant:

It all just stacked up that way. You see all these song titles in front of you, and you’re like, “Yeah, this seems like it’s all about fucking, for sure.” It turned out that way, but that wasn’t the intention for all of them. For some of them, yeah. I guess it’s because I listen to so much R&B, or pop music in general, it’s all about sex or love, and that was in my brain and it’s what came out.

On teaching piano:

It’s great, because kids are hilarious. They’re totally weird. I book my own clients, and usually it’s family friends and their friends. I’m well acquainted with all the families I work with. All the kids are really nice and they want to do it. It’s only if you have a kid that hates it that [it] sucks. But I try to keep the two spheres far removed. I had this show I played in Hamilton, down at this bayfront, family-friendly festival thing. A couple of the moms found out about it and were like, “We’re going to come! We’re going to bring our kids.” And I was like, fuck, now I can’t play a lot of stuff.

On Jed the Dancing Guy, the star of her “Kathy Lee” video:

He’s just this guy who has just been dancing around Hamilton for years. We thought that he might be schizophrenic, or have serious mental issues, but I found him on Facebook and wrote him a message and we met up and talked. It’s not like he’s a totally normal guy, but he’s not mentally disturbed. I think he had some life experience where his mother was going to die, and then she recovered, and he had prayed to God that if she got better he would dance and sing for the rest of his life; it’s some story like that. I think he’s very religious. He just goes for it every day. You’ll see him on the shittiest day in February, like the worst fucking day you can imagine, where you don’t even want to go outside, and he’ll just be shossing down Main Street, singing to his MP3 player. We were always like, “What the fuck is he listening to?” We had no idea. Then he put his ear bud up, and he listens to, like, Serbian folk songs. Which is not what you would think. He really gets going a lot of the time. It’s amazing that he’s listening to this male a cappella chanting.

He was really professional about the whole video shoot, though. He was a really good sport. He hung out with us for like eight hours.

File under: Ethereal and understated punk shoegaze; transformative, cathartic feminist art rock; a hallucinogenic soundtrack to radical punk adulthood

For fans of: Sonic Youth, My Bloody Valentine, Unwound, Ride, Helium, Kristin Hersh, Thalia Zedek

From: Olympia, Washington

Personae: Kanako Pooknyw (drums, vocals), Jon Hanna (guitar, vocals), Abigail Ingram (bass, vocals)

A few years ago, Olympia had a vibrant punk scene full of talented young bands and, while I was excited by the energy of a new era (Gun Outfit, Milk Music, HPP) and liked some of the music quite a bit (White Boss, Sex Vid, Son Skull), I wasn’t into how male-dominated and retro it all felt. Not only did it evoke the sound of ’80s hardcore and art-rock it also brought back the trend of guys-in-bands taking up too much space at shows. Suddenly, being a woman in a band started to feel tokenistic again. Jon Hanna and Kanako Pooknyw formed Broken Water with their friend Abigail Ingram and things changed. Pretty soon feminist punk bands (Hell Woman, Weird TV, Hysterics) took over Olympia and obliterated the dude-centric vibe.

I didn’t consider Broken Water a punk group until I saw them at a local hardcore festival. Before playing their set in a room of clean-cut kids dressed in identical skinny black jeans and brand-new ’80s-hardcore-band T-shirts, Pooknyw took off her clothes, protesting the idea that punk is a uniform that can be bought and sold. This performance was probably pretty freaky for the crowd of mostly teenage boys to witness — who had likely never had sex or even seen an adult woman with body hair naked before — and established Broken Water as a radical feminist punk band with a political agenda. Listening to their noisy, experimental take on guitar-driven shoegaze in this context, the music itself further interrogated the idea of punk as style. The music is loud, but it’s often slow, with pounding bass and drums that build and crash like cresting waves. The vocal melodies are pretty and memorable, but are almost subdued next to the roar of electric guitar. It’s hard to decipher lyrics, an aesthetic choice that emphasizes sound over meaning and creates an atmosphere where pure emotional chemistry is laid bare.

It was fun to sit down and talk with Pooknyw and Hanna about the ideas behind political strategy and reflect on what it means to be a feminist DIY band in 2013.

On DIY ethics and sustainability:

Pooknyw: We’ve self-released our records or collaborated with other independent labels so that we get half of our records. We’ve negotiated alternative terms with smaller labels where we pay for half of production and get half of the record — so if there is a pressing of 1000 records, we get 500 and when that’s done we get the plates and can press the next 4000. That is what has made us sustainable.

Hanna: We book all our tours. We try to make an effort to play all-ages shows in towns that can actually support that. A lot of cities don’t seem to have a DIY all-ages scene.

Pooknyw: We prefer to connect with people who put on shows that have similar politics to us but that doesn’t always happen. Sometimes we just play with bands we are into and realize we have a different ideology and I’m actually open to that.

Hanna: There is a line we’d draw about commercialization and what kind of shows we play — I don’t think we would play a festival sponsored by Scion.

Pooknyw: No.

On their favorite places to play on tour:

Pooknyw: I wanna talk about playing in Minot, North Dakota. They had all these really political books and punk-rock posters and it was just like, you walk into a space and you could tell it was a punk space and you could tell it was a feminist space and you just were safe — and they lived in a working-class neighborhood in a town that has been completely overrun by the fracking industry. That show reminded me of what it was like to live in El Paso and live in a scene where there weren’t that many punks and you stuck together and there was a reason you were on the outside and didn’t fit in because you had criticism of the status quo.

These kids really have each other’s backs. The girls we played with had never played music a year prior, they really wanted to play with other women. They all had kids and were really young and all worked really shitty jobs but they lived to be in their scene and bring bands in from out of town and host — in a really supportive way — and were totally political and totally against fracking and all this fucked-up shit that is going on in their town.

Hanna: I’m gonna talk about the show in New Orleans that Osa set up for us. It was a really good show and we were really stressed out at first because we got a call as we were driving into town that the show had been moved from where it was supposed to be. It was supposed to be in an abandoned strip mall, a generator show — but because someone announced it on the radio there were already like five cop cars when someone went there to start setting stuff up. But it got moved to a punk warehouse and it was great. It was a huge show: There were at least 100 or 200 kids that showed up and the power kept going out during everyone’s set but it felt like a real scene.

Pooknyw: There was a pony in the yard! It was bonkers!

Hanna: There was a pony in the yard. I was pretty blown away by how a show could get so fucked up and then come together as one of the best shows on tour.

On feminist performative strategies for subverting “male freedom”:

Pooknyw: You already have a target on your head, if you are female-bodied in certain audiences. My response to any kind of fucked-up behavior from male audience members — it was always male — was just to yell “male freedom” really loudly at the top of my lungs until they stopped.

Hanna: It happened a lot.

Pooknyw: It would happen a lot. I would yell it in this like kind of monster-truck-rally monster way where you couldn’t talk over my voice because it was just so loud and I would just repeat “male freedom” over and over and over again and there would be giggles from the girls in the front and you know, total embarrassment on so many men’s faces — embarrassed because they know what I’m talking about — and embarrassed that the sound person who is telling me to get naked or something is completely oblivious to the fact that I’m calling him out and making fun of him. I’m just stating, frankly, what I’m experiencing — his ability to not care about anyone else. When I see people laughing I know they are laughing at him they are not laughing at me. A few people were completely stunned. I wasn’t calling them out in a way where they could shut it down or deflect it. It was in a more manipulative or subversive way where they are gonna question what “male freedom” means — that is my hope. There was one drunk dude that just looked so dumbfounded and I was like, I think made a little fissure in the way he’s behaving. I don’t know, am I being too hopeful?

Hanna: No, but it is really frustrating to try to communicate with drunk people, it doesn’t really come across, you can’t really get through.

Pooknyw: Maybe I was just being more obnoxious than them!

File under: Brooding, original doom metal with an atmospheric touch and a mesmeric vibe

For fans of: Neurosis, Sleep, ISIS, Pelican

From: Boston

Personae: Milosz Gassan (guitars, vocals), Jeff Hayward (guitar), Max Furst (bass), Billy Knockenhauer (drums)

Impacting with the same bleak emotional pounding as Neurosis, the lumbering drone of Sleep and the stylistic flair of groups like Isis and Pelican, Morne are outsiders who dwell far beyond the trendy circles of post-metal or the insular enclave of stoner metal. Polish-born front man Milosz Gassan relishes his role as a mercurial outcast. When he’s not working at a Boston theater building stage sets, he spends endless hours obsessing over every tone and nuance of his music, crafting songs that ebb and flow between airy, textural progressions and dense, crushing rhythms. Morne’s third full-length, Shadows, combines the earth-shakingly heavy with the delicate and vulnerable, revealing both their anger and hopelessness for the human condition and the desire to conjure strength in the face of that despair.

Jon Wiederhorn talked with Gassan about Boston, Behemoth and the uplifting power of depressing music.

On discovering metal in Poland:

I was born in Poland in Gdansk and grew up there until I moved to Boston 13 years ago to be with a girl who was coming to America. I was in my 20s then. We’re not together anymore, but I’m still here. Poland was okay, but I grew up during the communist era. It was hard to find good music and there were almost no concerts. Vader was from nearby and I saw them sometimes, but because I was in Poland I was mostly influenced by bands from Europe and England, like [crust-punk band] Amebix, Godflesh and Pink Floyd.

On the spiritual influence of Behemoth:

I never was so into black metal, but I can say that Behemoth was an important inspiration. They were from Gdansk as well and I saw their first show in front man [Adam] Nergal [Darski's] high school. They weren’t on a stage or anything. They played in the hallway outside the classrooms. There were three of them and it was silly, but I thought, “Well, if they can do this, so can I.” Of course, they got much better and it worked out for them. I love their early stuff. It was very simple. I don’t know about their later stuff.

On not fitting into the Boston music scene:

I started to play with some friends in 2004, but it was hard to find the right lineup. Everyone wanted to play fast, so it wasn’t ideal. We established ourselves in 2007 when we recorded our first demo. But Boston is a strange city for music. We try to play here only once or twice a year because I don’t feel that we fit in. People get distracted very easily.

On mosh pits and stage divers:

I like when people close their eyes and listen to the music instead of jumping around and crashing into each other. I don’t need the crowd to be moving. I’d rather they focus on what’s going on with the atmosphere in the room and how the music flows.

On the uplifting quality of depressing music:

The band’s name is the French way to spell “mourn,” so I guess it makes sense that we write depressing songs. But we are not suicidal and we don’t sit down and say, “OK, let’s make some really depressed stuff.” Maybe the last album Asylum was more sad. I was getting a divorce right while I was writing it. But Shadows was written from the relief of having that being behind me. If you really listen to the songs, and especially the lyrics, there’s always some sort of hope and a belief in moving forward and hoping for a better day.

On the power of minimalism:

Our previous albums seem complicated to me. There are a lot of strange keyboard parts and weird atmospheres. This time we wanted to make a record that sounded as close to our live performance as possible. We got rid of our keyboard player and eliminated the keyboards entirely. We wanted Shadows to be very simple and natural, even though the songs are all very long. It wasn’t intentional. We just stopped working on the songs when we feel like we finished expressing ourselves, and sometimes that took 10 or 12 minutes.

On why it took more than a year to write five songs:

We started to write riffs for Shadows at the end of 2011 and we finished in January, 2013. From the outset we said, “Let’s not rush anything.” Let’s take our time writing riffs and making sure every part works with everything else.” At the same time, we didn’t try to overthink anything. We let the songs mature and sit, and then we listened back and when we liked something we didn’t mess with it anymore.

On recording during the Boston marathon bombing manhunt:

We were in New Alliance Studio in Cambridge when the bomb exploded. We went to take a break and we suddenly noticed we were locked down. There was nobody on the streets, but there were cops everywhere hunting down one of the bombers. It seemed like a scene from a post-apocalyptic movie when we looked out of the window and saw only police and nothing else.

File under: A straightforward, exploratory rock trip that does New Zealand's alt-rock legacy proud

For fans of: Arctic Monkeys, The Clean, DIIV, Widowspeak, Mac Demarco

From: Auckland, New Zealand

Personae: Matthew L. Paul (vocals, guitar), Eammon Logan (drums), Mike Ellis (bass, vocals), Jamie Kennedy (guitar)

Inking a record deal is a major milestone for any band, but when it’s with the quintessential indie label that’s touted the talents of some of your country’s favorite alt-rock icons, it’s a distinction on another level. That’s exactly what happened to Ghost Wave with Ages, their full-length debut. In New Zealand, Flying Nun Records has been the revered home of incendiary alternative rock, punk and reverb-ridden noise since 1981 — and the paradoxical perfection of Ages‘ straightforward riffs, cut-to-the-chase choruses and haphazard DIY approach fall right in line with the label’s stylistic tendencies.

A handful of bands Ghost Wave counts as influences have cut some of Flying Nun’s most beloved titles — the Clean and Snapper are two of frontman/guitarist Matthew Paul’s favorites — and though the label hasn’t issued a new release in nearly 15 years, Ages marks both the label’s first as a joint release with their American DIY rock brethren, Captured Tracks, and the start of a new era for the New Zealander institution. In that way, Ages is primed to be the release that puts New Zealand’s rock scene — and Flying Nun — back on the international map, and Paul in particular is thrilled to return to the States to give American’s a proper introduction to a new Auckland sound.

On the endearing qualities of the Auckland scene:

It’s amazing to be surrounded by people who really care about expressing themselves. There isn’t really anyone in town that I don’t like talking to about what they are doing and everyone is supporting each other. I think that is something that we have gotten better at as a town over the years.

You have a lot more space to shape up your music over here, because [the scene] is just not as big. That’s generally worked to our advantage, because we’ve had enough time to get our shit together and stay in and play without sort of playing haphazard shows so much. You can get away with fucking up here quite a bit, because it’s so small. If you’re going to play music over here, you can use shows as practice, in a way, whereas when we come over to the States it feels less that and more showy.

On pushing themselves with Ages:

It’s always kind of weird to look at a song and figure out what it was about later on, and a lot of the stuff on Ages is about what was happening in our band at the time. We were living in the city; we’d just put out a record and then weren’t too sure of our direction beyond making another record. None of it was challenging in a “We can’t do this!” kind of way, but because we recorded it in these air-tight sessions, it was sort of a challenge to remember all our ideas and lay them out, whereas now we have gone back to producing our own stuff and so recording sessions are lax and fit in with our lives. That’s how we prefer to do it.

On their favorite Flying Nun bands:

We’ve seen the Clean play a couple times and we played with them once or twice. What I like best about them is that they seem entirely natural about what they are doing; they seem to be pretty level-headed people when it comes to thinking about doing music as a career. Starting out, it was always the Clean that we looked up to in this way more than, say, the other bands who we love who sort of imploded from not having a grip on reality. Peter Gutteridge and Snapper are influential in a musical sense because these guys are like our uncles: In the ’70s and ’80s, they were getting turned on to the power of minimal song style and drone, and that is something that will always resonate with me and our band’s approach to get the most of out things.

On the culture shock of American touring:

New Zealand is pretty slow. If you watch our news, you’ll see stories of firemen saving cats from trees, if you know what I mean; it’s just that there’s not a whole lot going on, whereas you come over here, and you get absorbed into this crazy melting pot. It’s a bit of a cultural shock. I’d say that my experience playing shows in Auckland always involves needing to get the audience to let their hair down a bit, whereas folks in the States are a little less concerned about what their hair is doing, which I like. I find the crowds in the States to be a lot more pleasant. I don’t want to sound like I’m unhappy playing shows or making music at home, but because it is so small you will find that either you’re doing what’s “in” or you sit outside of things completely. I’d say we basically sit outside of things, and I know a lot of other bands who I really like from home who experience the same thing. There’s not really a psych/rock ‘n’ roll/folk scene here, whereas in the States, it’s like rock ‘n’ roll is alive and well under the surface of every day life. I like playing shows to people who know where we’re are coming from, and I feel a lot more connected in that respect [in the States].

On sounding like a New Zealand band (or not):

I guess we have a pretty good grasp on getting a jangly sound when we need to, but other than that I’m not really sure if we sound like a New Zealand band. I have always felt like the music we wanted to make was supposed to fall into a lineage that eventually became the blues, and then from there to rock ‘n’ roll. I really detest most music coming out these days because I think it is vapid and soulless. The ’60s stuff and earlier rock music is what I was raised on and makes most sense to me, and it just so happened that some other people felt the same way in Dunedin in the ’80s. With our first record, I can see how some people would think, “Yes, this sounds like New Zealand music!” because it’s kind of open — our skies are quite big over here and the cities are kind of small. I think we had that in common with other New Zealand bands that came through kind of spacey sounds, but to be honest, I don’t think about it all that much because no one is really doing our style.

File under: Ethereal pop delivered with a breezy simplicity

From: Portland

Personae: Daniel Hindman and Sarah Versprille

Pure Bathing Culture’s partnership sprung from Daniel Hindman and Sarah Versprille’s stint as part of Vetiver. But since meeting in 2009 the pair has distanced themselves from their beach folk roots, relocating from New York City to Portland, Oregon, and burrowing deeper into their stripped-down dream pop. Their debut full-length Moon Tides follows in the footsteps of last year’s self-titled EP, teasing out the duo’s bucolic sound with 1980s-influenced flourishes, subtle dance beats, and unexpected drones.

eMusic’s Laura Studarus caught up with both Hindman and Versprille. They told her about the strangest part of their cross-country transition, making the most of brief studio time, and why they’re keeping their fingers crossed for the existence of little green men.

On driving and surviving — New York versus Portland:

Daniel Hindman: There’s total culture shock here in Portland. Driving is just so different. People drive so slowly and carefully.

Sarah Versprille: It’s almost that they’re considerate to the point of being a little bit dangerous.

Hindman: You’ll be going 40 miles per hour on a road and somebody will just stop because they see a pedestrian on a sidewalk. It’s crazy. It’s super kind. It’s very compassionate. But it’s also dangerous.

On making their minimal studio budget count:

Versprille: I think there’s a certain amount of freedom to know that’s how you’re working. You’re not going to do 25 takes. You’re not going to do 25 vocal passes. You’re only going to do a few, and one of them is going to be great, and that’s the one that you’re going to keep. I think it’s an interesting way to be able to trust yourself and trust your ability, and document where you were at, at the time that you made the recording. In that sense, it’s a really neat thing to be able to go back to and think things like, “I did it that way, because I didn’t know that you could do it another way, and I was just at that point when we made the recording.” I think that’s a special part of making records in that way.

Hindman: It helps it to be really real. That record was recorded in 10 days. Nothing before that, nothing after that. That what we were doing for 10 days, and then we were done. It’s funny, if we were allowed to go back and work more on it, maybe we would have.

On believing in aliens (maybe):

Hindman: I hope there are. I actually like that aspect of the title too. The title for us became a concept that we were riffing on creatively. I like the idea that Moon Tides is a fantastical thing. It doesn’t need to be translated in some literal way to have some exact, deep meaning. I think for us it came to represent the overall ambience of the experience that we had making the record. I like that there’s such a strong relationship symbolically and scientifically between the moon and the tides, which is actually a working title we had originally for the record. But we wanted to strip it away from being so literal and maybe allow it to be something more fantastical that was a combination of the two things. To just be a little bit more open.

On their fascination with the moon:

Hindman: We have been for a while, really interested in the moon and all of its meanings. Scientifically and astrologically. We were really inspired by the relationship of the moon to the earth, and also the way the moon affects the tides and water. Water, as a representation of human emotion, and how the moon’s energy really effects, or could really affect us. Our bodies are made up of mostly water. The moon affects the ocean. It’s reasonable to think that perhaps it affects us in that same profound way. We’re really interested in that, and really inspired by that relationship.

Versprille: I think our interest in the moon, for me, initially was interest in the symbolism. Through different cultures and history there’s so much symbolism and meaning behind the moon. Eventually that does translate and resonate with the spirituality of the moon. At some point, it had a meaning. At some point from all the reading and thinking about it, it started to mean something a little bit more to me. It takes on a different meaning when you think about it a lot.

On water imagery in their music:

Hindman: It’s similar to the concept to the moon. The was one of the reasons that we were attracted to the name Moon Tides as well, because we did want to deal with the theme of water. For us, we think of water as emotion. We think a lot about rebirth and transformation. Those are sort of the themes. It sounds really strange. But it’s a means to an end. We’re musicians we’re not gurus. It’s stuff that turns us on and informs the songs. We’re just songwriters — we’re not new age freaks. The thing is that we’re really turned on by all that stuff. But we’re not out there, telling people that crystals will change their lives. That stuff functions as a muse for us. Maybe the next muse will be something completely different.

On soulmates and the song “Twins”:

Versprille: It’s about deep human connections. More so than predestine soulmates, it’s about when you do have that person, whether it’s a romantically involved relationship, or a relationship between mother and daughter or father and son. Those connections in life are the most tangible, real things that we have. That song is about the beauty of that connection.

Hindman: It’s also about how far someone would go for that. Being willing to transcend all things or transform to maintain that connection.

On looking on the bright side of life:

Hindman: I consider myself to be an optimist. I believe in positively. Again, not in some kind of preaching way. We don’t want to be gurus. But I believe in positively. I believe in optimism. I believe in trying to do the right thing for the right reasons.

File under: Dreamy and infectious, fiercely independent angry femme-core; experimental art-pop that's anxious and danceable

For fans of: Wire, The Raincoats, The Clean, The Plastic Ono Band, Mary Timony, U.S. Girls, Grass Widow

From: Oakland, California

Personae: Lillian Maring

Ruby Pins is the recording alias of Lillian Maring, best known as the drummer from Grass Widow. On her debut for Portland label M’lady’s Records, she layers her voice and instruments with effects, creating a magical, psychedelic backdrop over which she unleashes personal angst and articulates her politics using humor and vivid, nuanced storytelling. The record is an introspective masterpiece that also manages to feel whimsical and free. Maring’s lyrics capture the chaos, absurdity and pain of life as a woman under patriarchy. But instead of feeling depressed and constrained, Maring offers hope and optimism.

Tobi Vail spoke with Maring via phone and email on the eve of the Rub Pins’ first West Coast tour.

On the difference between Grass Widow and Ruby Pins:

I’ve been writing songs since I was a teenager. It’s like meditation or anything a person does alone to get their head straight. Grass Widow’s collaborative process teaches me to get outside of that realm and use a different part of my brain. [bassist/vocalist] Hannah [Lew] and [guitarist/vocalist] Raven [Mahon] and I have this method of making decisions based on what a song needs, not feeling attached to our own ideas. We’ve been writing this way for five years now. Last summer, I spent a month in Port Townsend, Washington, at my friend’s house just being alone and writing songs. Hannah makes music videos and Raven is a fine woodworker, and I was sitting on my desires to play more music.

On anxiety-as-parody & Ruby Pins’ sonic impulse:

Sonically, I was aiming for those moments in a song where it starts to feel out of control, like a guitar solo that doesn’t seem to know where it’s going, or the build-up in “A Day in the Life.” Those moments best represent my anxiety. When I translate those feelings into music I’m creating an enjoyable experience for myself, which is a way to acknowledge my feelings, process them, expel them and not let them rule me. It’s like I’m parodying my anxiety in order to live with it. Sometimes I feel like a stand-up comedian hiding behind a guitar. Like, “Hey everybody, doesn’t the world suck? Haha! Let’s rock.” I was thinking about Syd Barrett, Brian Eno, John Frusciante, Catherine Ribeiro, Jacque Dutronc, Wire and Yoko Ono a lot while writing and recording these songs.

On finding a voice as a feminist artist through pop music:

Art is exciting when it is political. I don’t have to scream from a soapbox to express my discontent. It’s a very angry album with a sense of humor to make it palatable. I like to think the songs stand on their own from an aesthetic standpoint, but they are all the more satisfying to me for the lyrical and conceptual content. I’m expressing a lot of anger and criticism, I hope that can be unifying for me and the audience. That’s what I love about pop music: It creates a space to introduce new topics of conversation by abstracting personal experiences. So much of this album is about me finding my voice as a feminist artist and being really overt with it because that’s what I feel inspired by. I wanted to represent some kind of supreme feminine idea that even draws on negative aspects — ways that women have been represented negatively.

On the name “Ruby Pins”:

“Ruby” represents red, like blood — and ruby is also my birthstone and I just feel special about it. And then “Pins” — I was looking through this book about witches and witchcraft, The Encyclopedia of Witches and Witchcraft by Rosemary Ellen Guiley. It’s about both current practicing witches and also about the history, and it includes a lot of weird, supposed [facts], because everything was destroyed. There were a lot of stories people would make up about women they wanted to burn, and the kind of shit they would say — the weird side effects that people had as a result of witchcraft. One of them said was that they’d puke pins. It just sounds so terrible, and I wonder what actually happened, or if that was just a descriptive way of explaining what it felt like? Puking pins is just such a jarring image. Ruby Pins kind of fell together.

On being femme and the song “Gagging on the Obvious”:

“Gagging on the Obvious” is about walking around in public as a woman and seeing other women and knowing the danger of being who you are and still going about our day as if there weren’t terrible imbalances at play. In the last couple years I’ve been sinking into being really femme, accepting that is how I want to dress and that it has not much to do with what other people think. It was a conscious decision, and I took into account the fact that I would be treated differently. On any given day as I walk to the post office or the train station, men are yelling “compliments” at me. If I dye my hair blonde there is a 40 percent increase in street attention. Literally. So I mentally prepare myself for that. I figure it’s everyone else’s responsibility to treat me with respect no matter how I look or what I’m doing, ideally. But the reality is far from that, because it is still generally assumed that women do everything for the attention of men. You have to embrace a subtle denial in order to get anything done, because when you start to consider how fucked everything is it colors your world and suddenly you’re embittered. I feel very fortunate to have a community of so many strong-willed, radical people.

On the state of underground punk culture and gentrification in the Bay Area:

There’s a lot more underground punk culture in Oakland than in San Francisco. Bands I really enjoy in Oakland include Daisy World, Stillsuit, PRCSRS, BAUS, and Pang! There’s Thrillhouse Records, there are all ages shows at 1-2-3-4 Go! Records. If you wanna play an all-ages show at a bar, tickets have to be more expensive, so it kind of creates a divide. I wish bands could easily play lots of all-ages punk shows that were accessible and that would be enough to support them. But the economy doesn’t allow for that, the cost of living in the Bay Area certainly doesn’t allow for that, and it seems that the communities that spring up around those ideals remain very insular. It creates an exclusive atmosphere and the aspect that is exciting to me about playing music, disseminating ideas, is kind of lost. Although the industry is fucked it’s worth it to challenge yourself in order to reach a wider audience. It’s fun to play shows for your friends and know that everyone is going to “get” what you’re doing, but it’s also kind of boring and not really instigating change. It’s an interesting challenge to play for people who don’t get what you’re doing.

File under: Electronic pop with a human heart

For fans of: MGMT, Missing Persons, Capital Cities, Niki & The Dove, Annie

Personae: Eric, Matt and Nikki

Thanks largely to their remixes of songs by Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeros and other indie bands that don’t ordinarily embrace dance beats, Brooklyn’s Little Daylight built a formidable internet buzz before they’d played their first show. Now longtime friends Eric, Matt and Nikki have an EP on Capitol Records featuring their blog-supported hits “Overdose,” “Name in Lights” and “Glitter and Gold.” Combining programmed elements with old-fashioned instruments, this well-educated trio is currently writing songs for their 2014 debut album, but will soon be touring in the fall. Don’t ask about their drug history: Their only overdose was on love.

On their name:

Nikki: It’s a fairytale story by George MacDonald about a princess who has a spell put on her — her moods are controlled by the moon. We responded to the idea of Little Daylight being something kinda cute and whimsical but can be kinda dark and serious.

On the band’s beginning:

Matt: We started because we had originals we wanted to record. The three of us felt like we had the same sensibility about what they should sound like. We took a studio up to a lake house that a friend of ours had lent us, and while we were there we decided to do some remixing to get some production ideas down without being too wedded to anything. We released the remixes first because the originals we were still working on; we’re somewhat perfectionists about that stuff.

On near-instant success:

Eric: The remixes — especially the Edward Sharpe and Passion Pit ones — probably got around partially because of the original artists and partially because of the remixes. And when we put out “Overdose,” it was good timing: The blogs were already paying attention to us. All we did was put it on Soundcloud.

Nikki: It got to No.1 on The Hype Machine, which was the work of the blogs, obviously, who helped put us on the map.

Matt: We’ve been lucky that a few of the blogs took an early liking to us because of the remixes. For anyone observing, it just looked like we were remix artists, and I think those people were all pleasantly surprised when we put out our originals.

Nikki: South By Southwest was our first and second live shows that we ever played, so it was a trial by fire. Luckily, because of “Overdose” there was enough word spread that people were coming to see us.

On how remixing shapes their own music:

Eric: When we do remixes, the song is already written, so it’s all about production — reinterpreting the song that another band. So in doing that as an exercise, we figured out where we all met in the middle with production, and after the course of three or four remixes, it started to have a signature sound, where we were able to approach our own songs in the same way. It gave us training wheels.

Matt: The song isn’t completely written when you approach a remix; you have the option to change things as you see fit. That ended up being a big part of how we write our songs, too. They go through an initial output phase, where we get it down and then usually take a break. Whether we mean to or not we almost end up remixing our own work.

On prior activities that also helps define Little Daylight:

Eric: One thing that’s important for both Matt and I is that there was a period when we were creating experimental electronic music without expectations. That got us some skills although they don’t come out in obvious ways. When we’re in the studio a lot, we go off on tangents that stem from that experience of doing experimental stuff that wasn’t trying to be pop songs.

Matt: I went to Brown [University] with a lot of people doing video and graphic art and installation art. [Eric went to UPenn and Nikki attended NYU.] That kinda stuff has informed Little Daylight in a filtered but very significant way. The three of us are thinking about not only the music, but how the music is going to look when it’s being performed, what our images say about us, the poster artwork down to the font; we’re very detail-oriented. Visuals are important to all three of us.

Nikki: We do our own artwork.

On their division of labor:

Matt: Everyone has an assumption of what we each do: Eric and I, because we’re guys, do the production; Nikki, because she’s the lead singer, is doing the top line, and then coming in at the end to sing when we’re done producing. But it couldn’t be more different than that. We each do everything. It’s been funny to see the stereotypes people hold and how universal they are.

Nikki: When we’re playing live, Eric plays bass, Matt plays guitar and synths, and I play synths and sing and we have a drummer.

Eric: But in the studio, it’s kind of free-range. We set everything up, lay all our instruments out, and when inspiration hits, you grab and go. Guitar, bass, keyboards and percussion — anyone could pick them up and perform. Even the vocals, up until the point where the song is getting to be finished, are open to any of us. And that’s very important to us, that we not limit any person to doing one thing or another and not doing other things.

Nikki: We’re an oligarchy.

On creating their “Overdose” video in the immediate wake of Hurricane Sandy on Manhattan’s electricity-challenged streets:

Nikki: We had the idea that it would be really cool to go out with a camera and see what happens. We invited couple of friends who are DPs and went driving around the West Village and Soho, where it was still pretty dark. We didn’t really have a plan. We just turned on the music on our iPhones, and started dancing to it. We were on a completely dark Bleecker Street, and there’s a really bright light in the background, an emergency light on this major thoroughfare. It would’ve cost millions of dollars to create a situation like that.

Eric: The police passed by us a number of times. Finally they pulled up next to us, and said in a very strong New York brogue, “You guys better watch out and not get hit by cars or something.”

Nikki: The other interaction we had that was really funny was that someone bicycled by while we were shooting and said, “Check your white balance!”

Eric: Only in New York or L.A. would somebody harass you by talking about video production techniques.

On their influences and relationship to pop:

Eric: A friend who doesn’t listen to that much pop music asked me if it’s a formula we’re trying to emulate. And I said that if you don’t love what you’re doing it’s going to be apparent immediately. We love pop music. We also love a lot of other stuff, and I think that love of music in general is what makes us make these tracks what they are.

Nikki: People listen to our stuff and compare us to Blondie. I sometimes hear echoes of Tom Petty in some of the songwriting, and I love both those artists.

Matt: We’re working on this thing for the album that’s heavily electronic, and for some reason it reminds me of Fleetwood Mac. It doesn’t sound like Fleetwood Mac, but we love Fleetwood Mac, and maybe it’s seeped in on some weird, left-turn way.

Eric: We’re working on something that reminds me of one of my favorite albums that has nothing to do with pop music, Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians. We listen to indie rock, classic rock, reggae, experimental electronic stuff, and we’re all big fans of straight-up club music. We all like to go out dancing sometimes and that’s the right music for that. We’ll come into the studio after having a late night and wanna turn the kick drum up a little bit.

Nikki: We’re really into classic songwriting. All of our songs, you could strip the production away, turn it into a different song and still retain a classic element to it.

Eric: Pop music these days is very much about bold choices. The bass is in the forefront more than it ever has before. We like loud things.

On their ultimate musical goals:

Eric: I think we’re trying to make good, classic-sounding songs where the verses, the choruses and bridges have an overall horizontal and vertical integrity to them. The same way Bob Marley relates to Aphex Twin is that their songs have a flow that is natural and beautiful and give you the chills when you get to the climax of them. We just wanna do that with every track we do.

File under: The soundtracks to the kind of nightmares induced by particularly harrowing horror movies

For fans of: Smashing Pumpkins, Black Sabbath, Royal Thunder, Mazzy Star, Pentagram

From: Brooklyn

Personae: Nya Abudu (bass), Cici Harrison (drums), Amber Myers (tambourine, vocals) and Jessica Numsuwankijkul (vocals, guitar)

It’s clear from the get-go on A Constant Sea, the debut from Brooklyn psych-sludgers Heliotropes that something ain’t right. On the album cover, a grim, skeletal visage peers out from the shadows. Thirty seconds into the first song, frontwoman Jessica Numsuwankijkul warns “red comes rushing through your skies” over the same gristle-greased guitars that occupied the better part of Smashing Pumpkins’ Gish. The record remains just as grim throughout, a turbulent meditation on loss and pain and spiritual darkness that borrows equally from early ’90s alt and late ’70s stoner metal. The grim music amplifies the record’s harrowing themes. “Don’t wanna be black or white/ don’t wanna be light or dark/ I don’t believe in good and evil anyway,” Numsuwankijkul sings on the ominously throbbing, Electric Wizard-conjuring “Good and Evil.” A Constant Sea is a bleak missive from the edge of midnight.

On the corruptive influence of her black sheep uncle:

I had this crazy uncle who was a drug addict — I didn’t realize it at the time, because I was a little kid. But sometimes he’d come over and say, “I’m gonna take you to the mall.” And I’d say, “Can you take me to the toy store?” but he’d take me to Tower Records instead, and I’d be like, “This isn’t the toy store.” I remember I wanted to buy a children’s record, and he was like, “You don’t want that,” and bought me Appetite for Destruction instead. I was eight years old.

And then I also have an older sister, and I caught a lot of bands I shouldn’t have pretty early, because she always had MTV on. The first video I remember seeing was “Lovesong” by the Cure. Disintegration was one of the first albums that I bought, but then Siamese Dream was the first record I really latched on to. I bought pretty much the entire Pumpkins catalog.

On the violent beauty of the Smashing Pumpkins:

My favorite stuff is actually on Pisces Iscariot, because it’s B-Sides from between Gish and Siamese Dream, and I feel like that’s the sweet spot for that band — totally phased out, fuzzy guitar tones. I always really liked how Billy Corgan could write songs in the early days that were loud and powerful but also in a major key without sounding wussy. That’s something I haven’t quite figured out how to do. I love a lot of early metal, too, and I feel like that comes out a lot. It’s also more fun to play really heavy music — I feel like we lean toward that.

On the sly virtue of early emo:

I bought [The Promise Ring's] 30 Degrees Everywhere on my first trip to New York when I was 14 years old. It was in the late ’90s. The boy that I was with had just gotten his license, and so we drove down to St. Marks. We went to Kim’s, and I was so excited. I was like, “Wow, I’m at a record store in New York!” And I was trying so hard to impress this boy. So I bought a Velvet Underground record and I bought that Promise Ring record, because I remembered him saying something about the Promise Ring on the phone. When I bought it, I was like, “Oh, yeah I totally know this band,” even though I totally didn’t. And I hated it at first! But at the time I was listening to Pavement — which is by no means slick, but it’s still 500 times slicker than the Promise Ring. I turned into a shitty hardcore scenester after that in High School, but I always secretly listened to the Promise Ring.

On struggling within the confines of stereotypes and critical laziness:

Music reviewers are too preoccupied with trying to find an all-girl band that we sound like at all times. “They clearly take cues from — ” and then they mention a band I’d never heard of before, so I look it up and, yup, it’s an all-girl band. They’re trying so hard to fit our band within their limited worldview.

A lot of writers seem to have shitty expectations about what we must sound like. You know, “What does it feel like being in an all-girl band?” I hear that so much. Or the implication that there’s a “girl-band sound.” I mean, I could make a piece of music that sounds like Sarah MacLachlan — which, by the way, I wouldn’t — and contrast that with, like, the chick from Boris, and you’re saying that they sound the same. I feel like that’s the implication. Or you’ll see someone write, “They’re not your typical girl band.” What is a “typical girl band”?

I stopped reading reviews recently because you can get a really negative review and get really upset about it. I mean, I don’t care if people pan my music, but I haven’t read a single negative review that doesn’t extend past the music to talk about who we are. Like, sexist, racist shit. There’s this one guy who actually wrote two negative reviews, that’s how much he hates us. This guy immediately starts off his review with [something like], “As a red-blooded American male, I find it really sexy when a woman can hold her own in the boys club of rock.” He then goes on to list all of our ethnicities, and then says that our image is the best thing about us, and that we actually suck. He says he thinks that Amber should front the band. He wrote, “I don’t really know what her voice sounds like, but she should be fronting the band.” By the way, Amber is the only Caucasian in the band. The thing that really bothered me was that he kept writing as if having a multi-ethnic band was some planned thing, or a gimmick. The implication being that if we were coming from a genuine place, we would be four white guys.

On her one-time day gig as an editor at DC Comics:

I got into comics when I was like 13 or 14 because Tori Amos was always talking about Sandman. I think working there is maybe the best 9-to-5 job you can have — it’s like being at Adult Day Care. But it kind of destroyed my interest in comics a little bit because, as with anything, there’s stupid corporate politics. It’s also super sexist — much worse than music. I mean, think about it: You’ve got all these guys working there — it’s like 75 percent male in that office — but not only is it a severe Boys’ Club, it’s a severe nerdy Boys’ Club. People would say things to me all the time, like, “It really sucks that sexual harassment occurs but, you know, that’s just how it is.” And then it’s worse in that environment, because you have all these guys who are so far removed from having female friends, so they’re not used to having women who are just, you know, doing the everyday thing. I mean, a lot of the women who get hired are the ones who are really playing up that sexualized aspect. It has nothing to do with their work. They’re like, “I’m a burlesque star!” Either that or they’re trying to be “one of the boys,” and there’s just no room for in between. You have to be seen either as a man or as this hyper-sexualized person for anyone to give you a chance in comics. I talk about this all the time with my friend Becky, who has the distinction of being the first woman to draw Batman — and it’s 2013 — we talk about this all the time, because she’s trying to find a way to straddle that line.

On the dark circumstances that informed A Constant Sea:

It was a really chaotic time. That’s probably why the album sounds a little darker — it was largely a reflection of the summer of last year. Around that time, I was dealing with my father’s long-term illness, I was dealing with being between jobs, and I was dealing with a really traumatic experience with my ex-boyfriend who was stalking me. I had a restraining order against him, and at one point I had to defend myself against him, and I actually almost got in trouble for defending myself against him. It was just an awful time.

On the afterlife:

Some people call [the afterlife] a liberating though. I think it’s mostly terrifying. I remember when my dad died — I remember how afraid he was. He was really scared. And I was like — they were giving him Ativan as he was about to pass away. Which I guess is a standard practice — they give people anti-anxiety medication as they’re slipping away so they don’t panic. I think mostly people are afraid that there isn’t going to be anything. And around that time I was listening to that 17th-century hymn “Idumæa.” Current 93 created a whole album where they just had different people singing different versions of that song [Black Ships Ate the Sky] — Marc Almond sings one and Will Oldham sings one and then Shirley Collins sings a version. And by that point in her life she had completely lost her voice. She was in her 50s, and to hear it — it’s the most graphically unsettling thing.

…and the myth of good and evil:

I was reading a lot of St. Francis of Assisi at the time, and in a lot of his writing he’s talking about [God being] this wholly good thing. And to think that something is wholly good is something that I haven’t been able to do as an adult. And I really would like to. I mean, the George Harrison song, “My Sweet Lord,” it’s about God, but to listen to him sing it, it sounds like he’s singing to someone he’s really in love with. And it’s so gorgeous. [Sings] “I really wanna know you. I really wanna be with you.” And I really wish I had that same capacity for devotional love. I don’t think I do, and I really envy that in other people.

I mean, you look down on people who have these perfect fundamentalist ideas, because you think they’re stupid. But in a way, you envy that, too. Because think how much nicer things would be if you really put all of your heart into this one thing and really feel like it’s the right thing and that it’s all good. That would be so nice, and I feel like I’ll never have that. And things aren’t defined in your heart and mind as wholly good or bad, what do you put your energy into? How do you live your life? If you’re the kind of person who reacts to trauma by trying to latch on to something — like, after a car accident, what’s your reaction? Do you become born again, or do you believe that life is chaos? Bad things happen to good people and events are arbitrary — it depends on what kind of person you are.

File under: A noisy, '90s-indie-rock throwback with ferocious smarts

For fans of: Dinosaur Jr., Helium, Polvo, Sonic Youth, Pavement, Liz Phair

From: Northampton, Massachusetts

Personae: Sadie Dupuis (vocals, guitar), Matt Robidoux (guitar), Darl Ferm (bass) and Mike Falcone (drums)

Speedy Ortiz began as the solo project of New York native (and ex-Quilty vocalist/guitarist) Sadie Dupuis. But by early 2012, the songwriter — who’s also working toward an MFA in poetry at UMass-Amherst and teaching expository writing — had enlisted several of her New England musician pals, including drummer Mike Falcone (whose band Ovlov frequently played with Quilty), bassist Darl Ferm (who had gotten to know both Dupuis and Falcone from booking their bands at Wesleyan, where he was a film studies major) and guitarist Matt Robidoux.

The quartet found kindred spirits in the Allston, Massachusetts basement scene, and they applied that DIY ethos to early national tours, focusing largely on house shows, DIY spaces and other unorthodox venues. (An entertaining look at these days is documented at the band’s photo-heavy LiveJournal tour diaries.)
The band recorded their debut, Major Arcana, with Justin Pizzoferrato (Chelsea Light Moving, Dinosaur Jr.) at his studio, Sonelab. The noisy record builds on the ragged sound of the group’s previous releases — specifically, off-kilter guitar lines and Dupuis’s hypnotizing alto — but piles on volume, aggression and sonic clarity. Dupuis smart lyrics (which are full of vibrant and, at times, violent imagery) are especially arresting, the perfect complement to Major Arcana‘s post-rock jolts and post-punk swerves.

eMusic’s Annie Zaleski talked separately with three-fourths of Speedy Ortiz — first, via a conference call between Dupuis (who was hanging at her mom’s house in Connecticut) and Falcone (who was gearing up to play a show with Gargamel, his ’80s metal covers band) and, several days later, a phone call with Ferm. The sprawling conversations touched on the advantages of the DIY scene, weird tour stories and how the band lives up to their “snack rock” moniker.

On the importance of cool college radio stations:

Dupuis: Before I was friends with Mike, I thought he was a great drummer. He used to DJ — and still DJs — at a radio station that I listened to when I was in high school [WXCI 91.7 FM in Danbury, Connecticut]. I probably found a lot of bands I liked via Mike.

Falcone: She called my radio show a few times. I didn’t know who she was yet, but I remember she requested songs.

Dupuis: I didn’t grow up near here, but I did go to high school not too far from the station where Mike works. And there’s nothing going on around here. You have to drive more than an hour to find any kind of cool record store. You have to drive more than an hour to find any kind of show spaces, even DIY stuff. It was very exciting to be able to get Mike’s show when I was in high school. It was the only good shit that was being played. [Before that] I was really into pretty commercial alternative rock, I think. Like, Letters to Cleo was one of my favorite bands when I was a kid. I’m stoked that they were a Boston band, even though I’m still kind of embarrassed to like them.

On cool dads:

Dupuis: My dad played keyboards in Television for like a week, before they apparently decided they were not a keyboard band [laughs]. Depending on who he’s talking to, he’ll either up-play or downplay the importance of this week-long duration. But I always thought that was a cool story.

On Justin Pizzoferrato’s studio:

Falcone: The main thing I remember about being in Justin’s studio, is he would have crazy stories about sitting in a room somewhere in England watching J Mascis and Kevin Shields have a conversation. And he said that after about a half an hour, the novelty wore away and he got really bored. He said they talked about guitars — but it was mostly Kevin Shields doing the talking and J Mascis would just nod and be like, “Yeah.”

On how academic interests inform Speedy Ortiz:

Dupuis: We have an academic schedule, which means a lot of vacation time, which we fill up with touring. I don’t know that teaching writing or taking classes about writing is necessarily an influence in how I write songs, because I think I come at them somewhat differently. But in terms of being exposed to different authors, maybe they’ll touch on a concept that will [seep into my] writing. I don’t know that any extra weight is added on that facet of my life. I wish it did, because it would probably be a cooler answer. The only thing is I scrutinize myself a little more lyrically than I would if I didn’t have to think so constantly about, “What’s the right word?” Other than that, I think it’s a pretty different process.

On touring and the DIY community:

Ferm: People are really, really supportive in the DIY community. I haven’t really met a lot of people that are conceited or show-offy. Everyone’s very humble, it seems, and everyone is very generous about spending money and supporting touring bands.

Touring’s just awesome. It’s an eye-opening experience, in a good way. Going to New Mexico was really insane [for me], because I don’t think I had ever seen desert before. It’s kind of freaky to see if you’ve just lived in hilly, city-ish areas your whole life. The south has a certain feel to it; Atlanta has a feel that’s different than New Orleans. Experiencing that is great, because most of my life has been stuck between New York City and Boston.

Going into the Midwest and seeing crazy punk kids that just live in Iowa City or something is [also] pretty amazing. They’ve developed their own community that you wouldn’t find out unless you walked right into it like we would, at these house shows or something like that.

On the decision to keep a band LiveJournal:

Dupuis: I just made it because I have a LiveJournal that I still use. Every band has a Tumblr now — a couple years ago every band had a WordPress, and before that every band had a Blogger. It seemed funny to pick the thing where it was most outdated in terms of blog presentation. And LiveJournal’s had an overhaul in the last year and a half since we started this account. You can now embed video. I kind of liked that you couldn’t do any of that [laughs].

Falcone: I thought it was kind of an absurd choice, which is why I thought it was funny.

On weird tour food:

Dupuis: When we were in Spokane, we stayed at this cool house called Marvin’s Garden. I was feeling kind of sick because I had been on tour for two months, and they made me a garlic scape tea with stuff they picked from their garden. It was like garlic flowers and some kind of citrus in hot water that they cooked in the sun [laughs]. It was helpful, I think; I drank a ton of it. They brewed the flowers of the garlic, and then they were having me eat garlic scapes, which was helpful. I think everybody hated my breath for a week.

On living up to their self-proclaimed “snack rock” label:

Ferm: Definitely my favorite tour snack we’ve had is poutine. When we were on the Canadian tour, Matt and I tried to eat poutine every single night, which was kind of a fun challenge, and then got to be a really gross challenge by the end — or a really not-great-for-touring challenge.

Dupuis: I eat a lot of kale chips. That’s probably my favorite snack.

Falcone: That’s a good one. I like nachos. Nachos and hummus are pretty good.

Dupuis: Mike’s our nachos expert.

Falcone: I don’t think I’m a nachos expert, I think that’s been overestimated.

Dupuis: The last time we did a two-month tour, Darl was working on this video series called, “Is It Nachos?” starring Mike. Mike would look at something and tell us if it was nachos or not [laughs].

Falcone: That kind of proved that I’m not a nachos expert. I think that chips and salsa constitute nachos. I think that’s good enough.

Dupuis: I think it has to have cheese. It has to have stuff on top of it; it can’t just be a chip and dip. Because then hummus would be nachos.

Falcone: No one bothered correcting me about it until Speedy Ortiz, so I just always called it nachos.

File under: Mazarin + Walkmen = Philadelphia psychedelic-pop powerhouse

For fans of: Mazarin, The Walkmen, Jesus And Mary Chain, The Velvet Underground, Elf Power, The Shins

From: Philadelphia

Personae: Quentin Stoltzfus (vocals/lyrics/guitar), Paul Maroon (guitar), Matt Barrick (drums), Peter Bauer (bass/keyboards) and Walter Martin (bass/keyboards)

Quentin Stoltzfus shot through the ranks of a late ’90s Philadelphia psych-rock scene — a tightly-knit faction of retro-futurists that included the Lilys, Bardo Pond, Lenola, Photon Band, Azusa Plane and Asteroid #4 — on the back of a near-perfect dream-pop debut album. Watch It Happen, released under the name Mazarin, revealed Stoltzfus’s talent for princely, soft-focus pop that was well aligned with peers such as Grandaddy and the Elephant 6 collective. Two more Mazarin albums followed, building a fanbase and framing out a wider stylistic canvas. In 2006, all the clocks stopped. Jason DiEmilio, Stoltzfus’s friend and former bandmate, committed suicide. That same year, Stoltzfus retired his group due to a conflict with a Long Island cover band of the same name, and Mazarin came to an unceremonious end.

And then Stoltzfus seemed to disappear. He pulled a Richie Tenenbaum, dropped out of sight, grew his beard. I saw him once, briefly, wearing sunglasses at night and piling into a Volvo station wagon with Kurt Heasley of the Lilys. Occasionally you’d hear news about him putting a studio together, engineering records for other Philly artists (Alec Ounsworth, Bloodfeathers, The War On Drugs), working as a mover, or building a chicken coop. He taught a songwriting class at the Esalen Institute, a spiritual center in Big Sur dedicated to Aldous Huxley’s human potential philosophy.

After seven years of repairing his psyche and purging his demons, Stoltzfus has returned in the form of Light Heat. The self-titled album features the Walkmen as his backing band, which is almost unfair — the musical equivalent of being born on third base. But Stoltzfus isn’t lucky; he’s good, and his songwriting seems to benefit from long gestation periods. Light Heat percolates JAMC’s Darklands through the Walkmen’s laconic Lisbon-era guitar tones and a wry, Kinks-y worldview, all imbued with Stoltzfus’s gift for light, airy melody.

On the early success of Watch It Happen:

I just remember being stressed out because I wasn’t qualified to be doing what I was doing. I’d played in bands all my life, but was never the songwriter or frontman. When I made my first record, all I wanted to do was collect the ideas I’d been thinking about for 10 or 15 years. It was more about ambition to write songs. With Azusa Plane, that was nothing more than three guys getting together and banging out noise. When [the Mazarin album] dropped and it got all that attention…NME (which named “Wheats” Single of the Week) wasn’t even on my radar. It was very foreign to me. I felt this weight of expectation, and I hadn’t even thought of putting a band together or even playing a show. It still blows my mind to this day.

On Mazarin’s first tour vehicle — an Auntie Anne’s pretzel van:

Auntie Anne is my aunt. I tried to buy that van, because it was such a great tour van, but they said no. It had been meticulously maintained. It had the Auntie Anne’s logo on the side. We went to New York a few times in it — it was a good gimmick. People would think we had a vanload of pretzels, but in fact we just had some dirty gear and sweaty dudes in there.

On the legal conflicts over the band name Mazarin:

We had been getting messages from these guys, and I sought out some legal advice. Everyone said, “Ignore them, they’ll go away.” They kept sending messages. It appeared to them that we were having huge success because we were on tour for 10 months straight. When we started engaging with them, they explained, “The name is very precious to us, we got the name from our father’s racehorse, we’ve been doing this since 1976.” There were all these emotional reasons for the name. Their friends and family members were sending me harassing emails and leaving messages on my answering machine. One email read, “I didn’t fight in the trenches of Vietnam to have my nephew’s band name stolen.” That has nothing to do with me. At the end of it, the guys in the other band said, “The name means a lot to us, but we’ll sell it for X amount of dollars.” My manager and I decided to close it up. The name is cursed. I don’t know if that was the right thing to do, but whether I went to court or bought it from them I was looking at $15,000 either way. But I didn’t have it.

On his time in the wilderness:

I would say that 2006-2010 were very weird years for me. I was soul searching, but also working toward finding a way to put my songs out. I basically made this record for free over that time period. I had started collecting recording gear and setting up guerrilla studios wherever I could. I started learning how to do production and engineering. I wanted recording to be as fluid as playing guitar, so I started on this journey of recording other people. I recorded two Bloodfeathers records, an Apollo Sunshine record, a Flashy Python (Alec Ounsworth from Clap Your Hands Say Yeah) record. I wanted to leverage my studio time and knowledge. My goal was to be able to record myself and not have it be an incredible challenge.

On learning to love his future backing band:

My band is the Walkmen. I’m lucky. We started touring with the Walkmen in 2000, only because we had the same booking agent. The first few shows I remember screaming at my booking agent: “I can’t believe you put me on a tour with these guys. They fucking suck.” By the third or fourth show, I have a distinct memory of leaning up against the van, exhausted, and we were playing a coffee shop in San Luis Obispo. I was watching Matt Barrick play drums through the window and realized, “He’s so good.” I became obsessed with watching all of them play, and we slowly started to develop this relationship. Hamilton (Leithauser) bought each member of his entire family a copy of (Mazarin’s 2001 album) A Tall Tale Storyline as a Christmas present. We recorded the basic tracks for the Light Heat record the summer after Lisbon came out. The point is, we’d been having this conversation for about a decade now. When Paul, Matt and Pete moved to Philly they started pressing: “We know you have the songs, we know you have a studio.”

On carefully choosing his new band name:

The Velvet Underground is one of the most important bands in my life, but it’s not a purposeful reference to White Light/White Heat. Believe me, I spent a long time thinking about the name. I wanted something that wasn’t used, and I wanted something that was two words easily understood by anyone. And I wanted it to have some cosmic meaning, which sounds cheesy, but that’s the criteria I came up with.

On the Lilys’ Kurt Heasley:

Everyone I know thinks he’s a complete lunatic, and he is. But he’s also one of the sweetest and most generous people I’ve ever known. Kevin Shields is a huge fan of Kurt’s. Seymour Stein signed the Lilys to Sire Records and famously spent hundreds of thousands of dollars making The 3 Way, which they then pressed about 5,000 copies of and shelved it. It’s a brilliant record. I lived next door to Kurt and his three free-range children. We spent a lot of time recording, talking, shooting the shit and getting involved in weird adventures. Kurt has been working at an ashram in Virginia the last seven years, maintaining the grounds. Occasionally he’ll call me and tell me about a new form of hip-hop he’s invented. Once a year we get together and record demos, and they’re awesome. Kurt is another creature all together. He illuminates and exists. He’s a force of nature. I’ve tried really hard to wrangle him. He can be a real son of a bitch to work with. If anyone is capable of wrangling Kurt, I’m capable of wrangling Kurt, and I’m not. He uses social dynamics to create music. He makes himself a spectacle to inspire other people to do something weirder than they wanted to do in the first place. Kurt has been a continual source of inspiration. I regularly rip his songs off. I’ll call him and say, “Hey guess what? I just ripped you off again,” and hang up the phone.

On the illness and suicide of bandmate Jason DiEmilio:

The Joyce Cohen article was brutal to read. I was around when that was happening and I had no idea the extent to which it affected him. Reading it was a bit of a closure, because I realized that what he was dealing with was beyond anything that happened between us. We had been estranged for a long time before he died. I just never understood it. I was mad at him for killing himself. In spite of the fact that we hadn’t talked for a long time. I still feel like he’s an instrumental person in my life, and I still have him with me. He haunts me, in a good way. He’s in my mind.

On creativity as a burden to normal life:

I feel a need to be a reliable, respectable human being. Being creative definitely gets in the way of that. I would love nothing more than to wake up and spend every day in my house in my pajamas, recording. I don’t have kids specifically for the reason that I’m dedicated to writing and recording songs. That is my marriage, those are my children. That’s how precious it is to me. It sounds melodramatic, but it’s a conscious decision on my part to not follow the normal path. I haven’t had a real job in 12 years because I want to be available to go on a tour if it comes up. Because of that, I’ve had amazing experiences. And it’s absolutely worth the sacrifice.

File under: Dark-pop with chart-topping ambition

For fans of: Charli XCX, Florence + The Machine, Lana Del Rey, Bat For Lashes

From: New York

Personae: Lizzy Plapinger (vocals) and Max Hershenow (instrumentals, production)

“We fear rejection, prize attention, crave affection/ Dream, dream, dream of perfection!” That’s the refrain of “Salty Sweet,” a song MS MR wrote about signing to a major label — but on their stellar debut, Secondhand Rapture, it would seem that the duo’s fears didn’t materialize. Not only do Lizzy Plapinger and Max Hershenow deliver an array of haunting, period-skipping pop gems: They strike a rare balance between maintaining their DIY background and opening up their sound for a larger audience to enjoy. By meshing classic pop with more experimental sounds, they’re making up their own rules, as well as borrowing from the playbooks of some of the bands Plapinger helped launch on her label Neon Gold, like Passion Pit, Gotye, Ellie Goulding and Icona Pop. MS MR’s approach is similar — as they put it: “Pop rooted in an indie ethos.”

eMusic’s Marissa G. Muller spoke with each of them about the transcendent power of pop, embracing Tumblr as a way to give listeners visual context, and their ambitions for this project.

On keeping their project under wraps:

Max Hershenow: So much of this record is about the fact that no one knew that we were doing it. Our friends didn’t even know. No one but the two of us was hearing these songs for a really long time, which means that the music comes from a genuine place.

Lizzy Plapinger: When I started writing on my own, it was a very private thing — it didn’t feel appropriate to let other people know that I was exploring music because of my work on the industry side of things. I had started to make a name for myself with Neon Gold. We didn’t want the music to be judged, for better or for worse, by my reputation and name. We wanted to let the music come out. There was no pressure.

Hershenow: Nothing about the project was premeditated. It all came very organically. It wasn’t until after we had collected enough material to release an EP in May 2011 that we thought, “OK, maybe we are a band and need to figure out a name.” We liked the anonymity of MS MR and the fact that it’s formal but also really informal and genderless.

Plapinger: There was something sacred about that experience, and Max and I bonded more because it was a secret. The other side of it was that Max and I are very much a pop act — we love pop and totally embrace it — and we talked a lot about pop music [getting] a bad reputation because it becomes so much more about the personalities or the celebrity aspect of a project rather than the music itself. That’s not something that we’re interested in — and it’s not our personality. So we wanted the music to stand on its own and be recognized, I hope, as credible pop artists that weren’t coming from a machine.

On the darkness of their standout single “Hurricane” and the rest of the album:

Hershenow: We wrote the album in 2011-12, years shrouded in potential apocalypse and impending doom. We write our best songs when there’s a storm coming or a sense of unease in the air. New York City becomes electrified in those moments. “Hurricane” is obviously the most exaggerated example. I wrote the track the morning after Hurricane Irene passed, sent it to Lizzy, and she sent me lyrics and the melody within an hour. We recorded it the next day. It was the fastest we’ve done a song. It just kind of poured out of us.

Plapinger: Max and I love this juxtaposition of extremes: Really dark elements combined with the lighter pop sheen. Sometimes the music offsets the dark lyrics and sometimes the lyrics brighten the music. It’s all about combining those unexpected elements, just like our love of collage and visuals. We’re always hoping to bring together things that shouldn’t fit together but do. When people meet Max and me, we’re much lighter and normal than people would expect but I think there’s a real darkness in us — in everyone — that’s difficult to communicate right off the bat. But, because we were writing in secret, I think we allowed ourselves to really go there and explore those darker sides of ourselves because there was no pressure or fear of exposing that.

On the story behind the gorgeous strings-laden “BTSK”:

Hershenow: From “Hurricane,” I really loved the French horn and became obsessed with that sound. I wanted to continue to explore that on “BTSK” and let it be super orchestral and ethereal. It’s a MS MR take on a power ballad. It’s pretty poppy at its core but the melody is so weird and the lyrics put you off balance because they’re not what you expect.

Plapinger: As we were writing this album — it sounds cheesy, but — I fell in love. It was nice for me to explore that other side of my personality and write a pure love song. “BTSK” is about the process of me [going] from a sadder place in my life to finding someone who made me happy.

On bending pop into new shapes:

Hershenow: One of our goals is to push the boundaries of pop — what you can include and still [call] it pop. We’re just starting that exploration. As we develop as artists, we’ll continue to bring in new things. We both have very different backgrounds in music and most of the overlap is pop. I grew up listening to lots of folk and rock like Paul Simon, Bruce Springsteen, and Natalie Merchant — that range of things has given me an appreciation for good songwriting. As I grew up, I started listening to more pop. I have a deep love for pure pop like Robyn and Beyoncé. I think Charli XCX has a really incredible, interesting ear for melodies that I think Lizzy has.

Plapinger: Max and I come from different backgrounds in terms of our relationships with different genres but we overlap in our love and appreciation of pop. Pop is an awesome term because it means everything and nothing at the same time. It can be found in any genre, whether it’s electronic, R&B, rock, punk, folk, country. So for us, it felt like the door was wide open to experiment. I feel like every song on the album has its own personality in that way. It’s an experiment with all of those different genres and time periods. I can’t shirk the bands that are deeply rooted in my listenership: Beach House, the Weeknd, Lauryn Hill, Cocteau Twins and Boards of Canada. We’re using our own voice to put a spin on the artists we grew up listening to.

On pairing their music with a fully-formed aesthetic:

Hershenow: Tumblr allows us to create an environment in which we want our music to be listened to, for free. Making music in the 21st century, people are going to be listening to your music in the environment of their computer screen no matter what so I think artists have the opportunity to control what that environment looks and feels like.

Plapinger: We’re always looking for interesting avenues to relate to an audience, whether that be Tumblr, or a physical CD or vinyl. It’s about creating a balance between those industry personalities.

Hershenow: We’re both very visually inclined and that possibility excited both of us, so we really took it to the next level with Tumblr. We created a rich landscape that mirrors [our] sonic landscape, so they work in tandem. What’s cool is that because we could do it for free, and make the record so cheaply, we worked in secret for so long that we developed a core identity as artists both musically and visually. That’s allowed us to maintain control over every element of the project — even though we’ve continued to bring more people to the team. Even now with our major-label record deal and a lot of people helping out, every decision and creative choice comes from us, which is an opportunity I don’t think a lot of artists at our level have.

On the merging of indie and pop:

Hershenow: I think it’s a healthy push for both things. That’s happening in mainstream pop as well. Gotye, Foster the People, Mumford & Sons, or even Adele — 10 years ago you couldn’t have imagined those musicians being in the Top 10. There is a shift combining [to] indie elements in pop music. I think it’s a really exciting time to be making pop. There’s no limitation on what you can do or what you want to bring into it.

On taking career cues from Arcade Fire and LCD Soundsystem:

Hershenow: We’re really proud of the fact that our music is DIY and independent. That’s the impetus for our project but we also have big aspirations. We want to make this a long-term thing and we want to make it a career. Those things are balanced in that relationship. For me, it’s important to maintain that sense of exploration and curiosity. When people ask us, “Who are your inspirations?” It’s hard for us to nail them down but the artists we look to are Arcade Fire and LCD Soundsystem, who played the long game and stayed really true to their visions while becoming increasingly popular and building it in a really organic and healthy way. That’s sort of the trajectory that we look toward.

Plapinger: We’re incredibly proud of our indie and alternative roots and that’s something we always hope to stay true to but Max and I are ambitious people and we have massive aspirations. We’re always like, “How are we going to do this for the rest of our lives? How are we going to grow as a band? How are we going to get to headline Glastonbury?” — which is, like, my ultimate dream in life. We really want to prove that we’re much more than a buzzy band. The careers that we admire in other people are Arcade Fire and LCD Soundsystem. Those are bands that have always stayed true to their left-of-center aesthetic but write great music and have really grown with their audience. It’s not about choosing whether we need to be indie or mainstream. Those worlds are colliding more than they ever have. There’s an opportunity to bring those universes together so I think we’ll always play to those extremes.

File under: Effusive soul meets baroque pop

For fans of: Frank Ocean, Owen Pallett, Rahsaan Patterson, Kronos Quartet, James Blake, Nico Muhly

From: Daytona Beach, Florida

If Marques Toliver comes across a bit brash, it’s because there’s little precedent for him. Both a classical violinist and R&B singer-songwriter, this 26-year-old world traveler boasts talents too big and broad to fit into any one box. On his stunning London-recorded Bella Union debut album Land of CanAan, Toliver combines literary and historical influences — among them, Frederick Douglass and James Baldwin — with music that ably blends an unlikely combination of Bach, Bobby Womack and Antony and the Johnsons. His voice may be urgent, but his virtuoso playing, elegant melodies and heavenly arrangements are the height of refinement. It’s not pop with strings tacked on: Violins supply the heart of nearly every song and Toliver plays all of them plus cello, guitar, keys and more. The result is southern soul mixed with equally intimate chamber music to create a third deeply spiritual, yet-to-be-named thing.

Barry Walters talked with Toliver about busking, determination and his status as Adele’s favorite new artist.

On how he spent his teenage years:

I was in orchestra from the age 10 all the way up until I was about 20. I was just immersed in the classical setting, the classical doctrine and classical foundation of music starting with the Suzuki method. When it was time for middle school, there was only one school in the county that had a string program, so I had to wake up at 5:30 to get to school before the bell rang at 7:30, and I did that for three years. I just kept studying the violin and going to specialized schools for the instrument. I was a part of the university and youth orchestra, which was about 45 minutes away from my home town, so I was always taking long trips to be a part of these musical ensembles that were a part of my public school training.

On moving to New York:

I came to New York just to visit a friend, and from that I started busking in the subway because the friend who invited me to New York wasn’t picking up her phone. I went to the gay and lesbian center to go online to find an orchestra friend who moved to the city — and luckily I did, through Facebook. From there, I just stayed in Brooklyn. One week led to two weeks because I was being asked to come to casting for modeling, so I got wrapped up in that world of being a 20-something in New York City. So between playing violin on albums of people I’d meet in the subway, I split my time working as a barback in Williamsburg and also teaching violin lessons. I was doing sessions for Kyp Malone and TV on the Radio, which would later lead to David Sitek of the same band asking me to work on another musician’s album [Holly Miranda's 2010 Sitek-produced The Magician's Private Library]. Then from that I was touring North America and that lead to England, and it just kinda snowballed.

On splitting his time between Brooklyn, London and Antwerp:

I’m a citizen of the world, similar to James Baldwin when he left the States during the Civil Rights movement and went abroad to Europe. When you’re African-American, your sense of home is a bit of a gray area because of the uncertainties when it comes to heritage due to slavery. That’s why church has always been such a big connecting factor for blacks in America, because it brings you all together despite not knowing what tribe or what region of Africa you may be from. You all can rejoice in the fact that you have this religion holding you together, despite it being a western religion [laughs].

On Adele proclaiming Toliver her “favorite new artist”:

Adele and I have a mutual friend, Richie Culver, and he’s an up-and-coming artist. He saw me busking on the Lower East Side and basically told Adele that Marques Toliver exists and that she should check out his music. And she did. So she decided to put up a little blog entry that I was her new favorite artist. Adele sat in on the first [A&R] meeting with Island Records because I had never met with a label before. It was definitely a good platform to gain a bit of notoriety within the industry without having to tour.

On working with UK pop songwriter/producer Eg White:

Eg White came into the picture simply because of his arrangements and what he had done for Adele with the string influence on songs such as “Chasing Pavements.” Eg’s father is a violinist, so Eg has a big classical foundation. We joined forces to create three songs for the album. We seized a lot of classical motifs, such Bach’s three Sonatas and three Partitas for solo violin, and we also created our own similar motifs with songs such as “If Only” and “Find Your Way Back Home.”

On the YouTube clip of Toliver jamming backstage with Shingai Shoniwa of the Noisettes and Sir Paul McCartney:

That was around the time of the Olympics in the UK. We were all on a tour together called the Africa Express, and the last gig was at St. Pancras train station, where there were about 15,000 people. Shingai and I had been rehearsing a song, and Paul shows up. There was just an extra third mic, so we were like, “Hey, just sing with us.” I was just amazed by the fact that it was going on, and then the next day it’s on YouTube.

On his predecessors:

Nina Simone, Jimi Hendrix, Little Richard, the Isley Brothers, all those things have contributed to my music along with a lot of classical violinists, such as Jascha Heifetz, Pinchas Zukerman, Yehudi Menuhin, and [cellist] Jacqueline du Pré. And so many things within literature, like James Baldwin and his conflict with being religious and homosexual and a Civil Rights leader. I think I need a radio show to go into more detail.

On showing off his torso in his videos for “Control” and “Deep in My Heart”:

It’s just a way to document one’s being. Maybe for the American market it’s a bit risqué, but for Europeans the body is no different from a leaf falling from a tree or the lightening striking. It’s just life. I wouldn’t put myself in the same category as D’Angelo. He’s more of a heterosexual eye-candy thing.

On taking the high road:

I’m all about being elite and pushing myself. The easy thing would be to lie about one’s sexuality, go on a reality show, and try to make it big that way as opposed to forging your own path and clearing the dirt and paving the cement — or maybe not even using cement. Maybe using some solar powered device to create your journey. [Laughs] I just don’t think about it that much. Because if you’re a violinist, your palate is a bit more refined. I’m still immersed in things considered brutish or unmusical when it comes to contemporary things. Introducing different types of sounds into my world I find helps, as opposed to limiting myself or dumbing down my music.

On his ultimate goals:

I would like to sell enough so that I can invest in property and create music schools and ensure that student programs won’t diminish because of budget cuts. [I'd like to] become the male version of Oprah and introduce cultures to one another. I take it for granted that I can live in Belgium and two days later go to Paris and then be in London and then go to Berlin. I know we all have computers, but there’s a difference between having a screen show you photos of a world far away, and going to a concert and being transported to one of these worlds. And [I'd also like to] collaborate with musicians I’ve looked up to, such as Quincy Jones or Herbie Hancock or Beyoncé or, I don’t know, Katy Perry. Or just go very traditional and do things with Smokey Robinson or Adele. I’m really at the beginning of my career, so it’s hard to say, but I definitely want to be playing music and composing.

File under: Art pop with strong scholarly grounding

For fans of: Laurie Anderson, Kate Bush, P.J. Harvey, David Cronenberg's Wife

From: Oslo, Norway

Jenny Hval’s second solo album — fourth, if you count the two she recorded under the pseudonym Rockettothesky — opens with the Oslo-based artist illuminated by the glow of a computer screen as she watches internet porn. “It’s late and everything turns a white kind of dirty,” she says, setting the scene over a curious cascade of synths.

Forty minutes later, the album ends with Hval envisioning her voice as a second flesh. “My body is the end,” she sings on “The Seer,” as a psychedelic keyboard unspools into infinity.

The ideas on Innocence Is Kinky are bold, but the music itself takes even more risks; Hval combines synth-pop, performance art, drone, garage rock, skewed folk, spoken word and wordless ragas into a constantly mutating sonic palette. It’s the combination of music and concept that drives Hval, an academic and critic who wrote her master’s thesis on Kate Bush, penned a novel called Perlebryggeriet (The Pearl House), and designs sound installations such as the recent “A Continuous Echo of Splitting Hymens.”

Innocence Is Kinky grew out of Hval’s installations, yet the songs took on a life of their own as she played festivals and clubs around Scandinavia and Europe, where a new aggression snuck into her performances. By the time she recorded the album with producer John Parish (P.J. Harvey, Sparklehorse, Grandaddy), the songs had morphed into all new arrangements that allowed Hval to bend her dexterous voice into all new shapes and sounds.

As she prepared for tour, Hval spoke with eMusic’s Stephen M. Deusner about film close-ups, European nationalism, the male gaze and the challenge of writing pure sound.

On working with John Parish:

A friend of mine from Australia had almost worked with him, and she was saying how nice he was, so I decided to contact him — but I’m very shy, so I had to get someone else to do it. He was very nice and incredibly balanced and very open, and he was not in any way judgmental about the music, which allowed me to be more spontaneous. He was just this wide-open ear, and was brave with the music. Plus, he threw himself into playing with my band as a band member, so it was very much a creative collaboration. It was very relaxed and we had a lot of fun. It was very positive and almost like a cheerful process, and there’s actually a lot of humor on the album. I have this tendency to get stuck in this weird way of thinking, where I find that something must be serious to be experimental. How dumb. When I got home from recording, John sent me one of Captain Beefheart’s albums — Doc at the Radar Station — and I’ve been listening a lot to that and learning a lot from that.

On writing and singing in both English and Norwegian:

Obviously, my Norwegian is superior to my English. I only started writing in English when I moved to Australia. But sometimes I feel like I’m a grown up in Norwegian but I’m a teenager in English. I’ve grown up listening to pop music with English lyrics and almost nothing with Norwegian lyrics, so English was always the language to be sung and Norwegian was the language in which teachers told you what to do. I remember listening to a lot of the Velvet Underground, and I didn’t understand any of the drug references. That came later. When you listened to pop music, you didn’t understand a single word for years, so you just invented your own meaning. It’s very far away from what the actual meaning is, but you have this amazing process of just listening to language and not even thinking that it is language. It’s this quality of seeing straight through the words and into the sound. English was always freer, and I still tap into that freedom when I write. But recently I’ve written a couple of new songs where I sing in both English and Norwegian. For me, this is just crazy. I have no voice in Norwegian, so I find myself sounding like I’m doing traditional Indian singing. So I’m still trying to learn how to sing in Norwegian. It’s very new. But I’m of two minds about using Norwegian, because it’s very hip at the moment to return to your own language and to me I can’t help but think of what’s going on in Europe with this new right-wing nationalist movement. I find it very frightening.

On accidentally writing more aggressive songs:

My previous album was much more of a quiet, inward-looking album, and I got fed up with “inward-looking.” When I played live sets that were much more quiet, I got really sick of my own songs very quickly and had to stop playing them. I could never go back to them, ever. But I think it’s changed a lot for me, I think just from doing a lot of improvisation. I just played a lot, and songs like “I Called” are songs that I would have gotten rid of before. I played that song as an improvisation and thought, “What is this about?” It was like writing a blog. Quite a lot of songs were like that, and I guess I was just trying to get my head around this new aggression — singing louder and playing louder. So I decided to keep that song instead of moving on to more refined songs. The aggression was there at that moment, and I found it to be interesting as an expression.

On not trusting her instincts:

I’m not sure that I always trust my songs. I just play them anyway. I was talking with someone about this last night. We were discussing if we were thick. I said to her, I don’t think I have thick skin, but there’s this stupidity in me. Even if I’m affected by everything, I just don’t know how I can react to it. I’m almost like a grunge artist — I am full of self-hatred and I don’t trust what I do at all. Yet I have no problem doing it. But I think that’s why I change the way I play live. I have a moment of trusting a song, and then I go, “No! I have to change it!”

On looking outward to look inward:

Innocence Is Kinky is an outward-looking album, but what it’s looking at is a world that is very much a mirror world. It’s a world of visuals that are just telling you to look at yourself, to identify with everything. This has been my experience watching a lot of films over the years, as a female spectator, and seeing the objectification of the body in all different kinds of genres. As a young girl, you’re asked to identify with being an object or identify with being looked at. It can be painful to look at things and realize that everything is about looking back at yourself. Visual culture is just this mirror. There’s nothing else. There’s nothing behind it. It reminds me a little bit of the dangers of capitalism, which lays everything on the individual so that no one is to blame. Everything is your own fault. If you didn’t make it, it’s your fault. There’s no system.

On being ready for her close-up, Mr. DeMille:

I watch a lot of everything. I have no boundaries. There is nothing I do not watch. My interest is so nerdy that I don’t care so much about gender, and I’ve always been so obsessed with film and also sounds and voices on film. There are no voices in Joan of Arc, but you have that face, which is so close. It’s very much like pop music where you always have the voice with the microphone very close, so you have this ability to be huge. This is something I find very interesting on stage, where I can whisper and it will be enlarged It’s like a magnifying glass for the voice.

On dividing her time as a musician, novelist, critic, and essayist:

I see things as very connected, so it’s hard for me to separate between writing an essay and writing a song. Sometimes an essay becomes a song, which doesn’t mean that it shouldn’t be a song or that it could only be an essay. On the other hand, I find it very hard to write music criticism. The more I write, the harder it gets and the more I realize I’m just saying the same thing over and over. As for fiction, I’ve written one novel and a book that I would just call a book because it’s trying to be much closer to the music and the way I work with sound and voices. It was an attempt for me to get closer to the speaking voice and the sounds I hear in language in my head when I write, which was great. But writing a novel is very distancing from that directness that I’m very fond of in my songwriting, and there’s so much more writing of words obviously than in a song. The music is gone and then you have all these descriptions in a novel that replace sound. Where is he? Which way is he looking? What’s the color of this? Rather than just the [sings] daaaaaah of sound. And to me the daaaaaah is much more interesting. So yeah, I’m trying to write more like sound.

File under: Dream pop with classical roots

For fans of: James Blake, Cocteau Twins, Bat For Lashes, Beach House, Bon Iver

From: London via Guernsey

Personae: Kate Sproule (vocals, lyrics), Stevie McMinn (acoustic guitar), Sebastian "Bassi" Fox (production, electric guitar), and Alex Mitchell (drums)

When Kate Sproule started Mt. Wolf in 2011 with her childhood friend Stevie McMinn and his college mates, she’d hardly sung a note. Still, she was so committed to pursuing music that she turned down her first post-college job offer to stick with the band. It’s a risk that seems to have paid off: Mt. Wolf’s delicate indie rock stands out among London’s current sound sculptors, savvily blending bass music, folktronic and indie R&B. Only two EPs into their career, Mt. Wolf have already established a signature sound that’s organic and soothing even while Sproule’s lyrics tackle emotionally-abusive relationships and the drabness of 9-to-5 life.

eMusic’s Marissa G. Muller spoke with Sproule about the darkness underlying their Hypolight EP, the far-out space where it was recorded, and how it felt to receive props from Diplo for their cover of Usher’s “Climax.”

On bringing together their knowledge of different genres:

I’d never been in a band before, but my brothers were always handing me amazing records like Radiohead, Jeff Buckley and Massive Attack. I had formal training, [both] classically and in jazz piano and violin, and I did a bit of vocal [training] at university. I had a classical choral scholarship at Cambridge, so I sang quite intensively. I’m sort of still obsessed with vocal harmony and the range that you use in classical; it’s rare in mainstream pop music. I had to learn how to let go of all that training, but there are definitely undercurrents of it. The guys all used to play in guitar bands. Our drummer played heavy rock and Stevie took me along to see him. It was so loud, I had to put my headphones in. So we’ve tamed that side [of him] since we’ve become Mt. Wolf.

On rebelling from her classical roots:

My mom and dad were very musical people. They met when they were classical singers in London, so that was quite an influence growing up. The school at which I trained was well known in the UK, and quite intense. We were made to practice extensively, and it was quite a rigid classical music regime. By the end, I had grown tired of that and wanted to be a bit more expressive and write my own music rather than interpreting other people’s compositions. There’s a definite catharsis I found in writing something from scratch that I didn’t find with the more formal stuff. I guess Mt. Wolf is a rebellion from that; letting go and doing what you want is quite freeing when you’ve trained extensively. This was the first time I’d ventured into actually making three-minute, four-minute songs.

On differentiating their music from London’s sounds right now:

London has just exploded electronically over the last few years. As much as I think it’s really interesting to draw influence from what’s going on in London right now, we like to keep our own methods.

We like to draw on lots of different stuff and play around with it. Our songs are very structured in a lot of ways, and they come across more like a band’s than some of the more sprawling electronic compositions. When we play live, we play everything live. We don’t need any kind of backing track or decks. So for us, it’s more a case of picking from different things that we like. Our sound is very sample [based]. Rather than using synths and programmed sounds, we try to manipulate acoustic recordings. We’ll have a guitar line or a vocal line that is sung in, and then we chop it up. We can play around with it in Logic, play around with it electronically, reverse it, sample it again, and make a rhythm out of it. So we’re basically trying to recycle acoustic sounds to create the soundscape that you hear.

The story behind the title of the Hypolight EP:

I got a bit obsessed with the idea of the space that’s created just beneath light, where it’s almost darkest. I thought of a street lamp, and how you get that dark space just under the glare of the street lamp, and what that meant across a number of themes. The EP sort of muses on how to break free from that really dark space. So it’s quite solemn and it’s quite somber. I always find it interesting and surprising when listeners get a lot of positivity from our songs, or find them quite relaxing. For me, these songs are the inner workings of something dark and difficult. It’s quite emotional for me, and almost disturbing. So it’s funny when people say they find it relaxing, because I find it quite the opposite. Musically, it’s more confident than our first EP but it’s a lot more fragile, in terms of [the] darkness and sadness it talks about.

On their melancholic lyrics:

I get obsessed with imagery that weaves its way in and out of my life. “Veins,” for example, I wrote quickly in the confines of an office space looking over the City of London — all the busy people dressed in black wandering around. It’s basically a song about trying to break out of something, a place or a feeling that you don’t want to be, and thinking about how to get somewhere else. “Shapeshift” is about the feeling that you’re being held in an emotional place, trying to get away from something or someone that’s not allowing you to break out. That song is an emotional tussle — you know you should be getting away, but so many natural instincts make you want to stay. The whole EP is about lyrically trying to break into new, happier ground.

How their cover of “Climax” came about:

We were asked to do this show last summer in London, a really great project called The Coveryard. A girl I went to university with gets together an orchestra and then invites an artist to come along and have their songs reworked or perform covers. So she asked us to do [Massive Attack's] “Teardrop” — which was also amazing — and then we chose to do “Climax.” At first I was a bit skeptical of doing the song, I couldn’t quite hear how it would sound. But I think it translated pretty well [and] we brought kind of a new dimension to it. We were pretty amazed to see that Diplo mentioned it on his Facebook wall and seemed to enjoy it. So that was a big comfort to us, that we hadn’t totally ruined someone’s song.

On the studio space where they recorded the EP:

Bassie, who produces all the stuff, has a studio down in the countryside in Dorset. We went down there in January and recorded it in front of this huge bay window that overlooks the English countryside, and it was just beautiful. There’s nothing for miles; just green hills. It was a great place to do it [and] encapsulated that disturbing and isolated headspace on the record.

On the meaning of their name:

There’s a song on the first EP, Life Size Ghosts called “Cry Wolf,” which we wrote before we named the band. We found the wolf imagery quite alluring. It’s a dangerous creature, but [it also] has this mysterious element. We liked the idea that [Mt. Wolf] might be somewhere that doesn’t really exist and is ethereal but also has this element of darkness and potential danger. When we actually found out that it was a real place, it made sense to us because our music sounds celestial and otherworldly but at the same time the subject matter is pretty down-to-earth and grounded in real time and a real place. Obviously it’s not anything new in terms of band names — quite a lot of wolves out there.

File under: Smart guitar pop with feelings; don't call it a side project

For fans of: Real Estate, M. Ward, Unrest, The Feelies

From: New York

Personae: Alex Steinberg, Jacob Wolf, Nick Lenchner, Dylan Shumaker, Jarvis Taveniere, Amelia Meath

It was a simpler time when Alex Bleeker and the Freaks released their self-titled 2009 debut. “The recording of that record took one day,” says Bleeker, who also plays bass in Real Estate. “The songs had been written, it being the first record and all, throughout my life. They were the best songs I’d written up to that point.”

When it came to making How Far Away, the group’s sophomore offering, things weren’t quite so easy.

“This record is pretty much the opposite experience of the first,” Bleeker says of his 11-song, lovelorn charmer. “I had the idea I wanted to follow up, but I didn’t have an exact plan. The recording process was stretched out over about two years and that’s just from when we started recording the earliest song on the record until we finished it.”

Made during the height of what he calls “Real Estate madness,” How Far Away was made in fits and starts whenever Bleeker and his cohorts had time to devote. The idea for what it would be, however, was set in stone early on. “The idea for the record came together as quickly as the first record was finished,” he says, “but it took this long for it to fully come together.”

eMusic’s Adam Rathe spoke with Bleeker about his love for the Grateful Dead, his theatrical ambitions and what happens when fans request Real Estate songs at Freaks shows.

On jam bands:

I don’t blindly subscribe to the music that is widely beloved by the jam-band scene. I think most of it is really bad. That said, I do love, love, love the Grateful Dead, particularly at this point in my life. I’m in the deepest Grateful Dead black hole I’ve ever been in.

What’s cool about the Dead is that they were always on the forefront of technology and ahead of their time. Basically, all PA systems we use now in modern concert halls were invested by the guy who made the original sound system for them and had the idea of multiple speakers stacked up in a row in front of each other in order to create a big sound.

You could chart the hipster acceptance of the Grateful Dead. It’s probably the highest it’s ever been. People used to have shame about it, people who grew up on the Dead and appreciate them a lot have been sheepish about their love for the Dead. Whatever happened in Brooklyn in 2009, when everyone was wearing tie-dye T-shirts and there was weed everywhere — that was the gateway to the Dead being cool. I also really like Phish.

On being a theater geek:

It’s sort of a sensitive subject. I think about theater a lot because I’m really not involved in it right now at all. That has a lot to do with the fact that the music thing, which is another dream of mine, took off. Which is great. I grew up expecting that, when I finished college, I would move to New York and be struggling to work in theater. I studied theater in college; it was always my biggest passion. I came to it the way a lot of people do, via theater in high school because it was an outlet that wasn’t sports. I had this really comprehensive high school program and the people who did it were really cool. It was the only thing I was really good at.

I moved to New York City and I was interested in new media and video in theater, which was a really hot thing at the time. I was the video guy who wanted to perform, too. I did a performance at the Kitchen, which was a really big deal for me. Then I started going on tour a lot with Real Estate, and it’s impossible to tour with a band and be at theater rehearsals at the same time. I haven’t lost interest, but I’m just not doing anything with it. I think a lot about doing something again and how I could make it work. You can go deeper with a theatrical performance and touch more complex things that you can while playing with a rock band. But when I’m on stage, it’s still a theatrical performance.

On making a break-up record:

I didn’t set out to write a record about heartbreak, but that’s what it is. It’s like, “Oh shit, I guess this is what I’m writing about.” It’s beyond the point of just grieving and feeling sorry for yourself — it’s not sad, it’s just practical. Like, what comes next? In my case, I’m not debilitated by this thing, it’s just the reality as I wade through other relationships and try to make them work as compared to this weird gold standard. Obviously, there’s tons of precedent for it — most songs are sad love songs. There’s some sort of collective unconscious thing that happens. Lyrically, I go there a lot and I don’t know why. It makes me feel better, I think. With a three-minute pop song, the best thing you can do is relate to a broad spectrum of people. It’s something a lot of people have experience with, so it can be cathartic to write a song and also to hear a song that reflects situation you’ve been in.

On being that guy from Real Estate:

The fact that people will give my record a chance because I’m involved in Real Estate is positive for me. I’ve had a lot of opportunities based on that. You don’t want to be like, “The only reason people give a shit about this is because I’m in another band,” but at the same time it’s not like I’m a hired-gun bass player for that other band and I have nothing to do with the creative process. In a way, I feel like it’s all part of me and if that brings you to my solo music, that’s so much the better.

Sometimes at shows, people come up and ask me to play a Real Estate song and I have to explain that this is something else. But then sometimes people come up and say they like my solo stuff more than Real Estate. But that’s me, too. I’m not competing with myself.

On the physicality of being a frontman:

With the Freaks I’m in the middle of the stage and I’m singing all night, but I’m pretty good with my voice. Actually, I took choir class for a long time, so I know how to sing correctly. It’s not something I think about when I’m singing in a rock band, but I’m used to it and I know how to do it. For Martin in Real Estate, before we played a ton of shows, he hadn’t sung much. For him, it was figuring out how to be good to your voice; I’d often tell him he’d blow his voice out. Now he’s a singer who’s really aware of that.

While I don’t get into the whole tea thing, it’s definitely real for me and it’s what I do. The Freaks are a lot more about vocals and the lyrics and communicating those feelings. So, I do a lot of the work for the band in my voice. It’s something I’m using a lot.

On coming from New Jersey:

At this point, that scene [is growing] exponentially. I can speak to Ridgewood High School directly, which has birthed a lot of bands. It’s crazy to me. There were just people obsessed with music who wanted to play in rock bands. We formed this scene in people’s parents’ basements and it was really special and rewarding. The first group of those people to get recognition in New York doing that was the Vivian Girls and Titus Andronicus, and they were an inspiration to the rest of us. It was like, “Oh, man, those are our friends.” I knew those people and where they came from. It impregnates you with a sense of possibility — that’s our scene, if they can do it, we can do it. Now bands like Big Troubles are a few years younger than us, but that attitude we had I can see in them.

File under: Classic guitar pop. Glitter girls who like to skateboard and make art. Stylish and sharp. Bubblegum punk. Love rock for heartbreakers who don't mess around.

For fans of: The Buzzcocks, The Breeders, Blondie, Best Coast, B Girls, Beach Boys

From: Los Angeles

Personae: Jennifer and Jessie Clavin

When women and girls listen to love songs written by and/or performed by men, we have to filter stuff out, switch pronouns and, often, navigate a sexist point of view. After a lifetime of listening to male-dominated pop music I’m used to making these kinds of adjustments in my head, but I still feel starved for love songs that I can actually identify with and dance to without a power struggle. This drives me to write my own songs and actively seek out pop groups that give voice to a female perspective on desire. I want to know what girls want, not just what guys tell us we want.

Bleached’s Ride Your Heart is quickly becoming my favorite American guitar-pop album since The Breeders’ Last Splash. Upbeat, infectious melodies are enhanced by minimalist arrangements reminiscent of power pop by Nick Lowe or mid-period Ramones. The songs explore the tension between narcissism and objectification, desire and attraction, longing and sweet sadness, real feelings and true crushes. It’s the sound of a girl’s fast-beating heart. You don’t have to be a teenager to feel like one; just put this album on repeat.

It was my pleasure to chat on the phone with Jennifer and Jessie Clavin about their evolution from Mika Miko, their visual aesthetic, and the L.A. music scene.

On playing in the all-teenage-girl punk band Mika Miko:

Jennifer: We would tour so much, but we were all like best friends. We learned how to play our instruments playing in that band; I learned how to book our tours. Also the hard parts of touring: how to deal with being so close to people all the time and work through situations. Just a lot of crazy things would happen, and we’d have to deal with it on tour and being really young. One night in Texas — it was our first tour around the U.S., and we stopped at SXSW and met this guy who invited us back to his house to party. So we went, and like — we know, you know, “don’t eat like shit, drink water” — but we were smoking weed from this huge bong and all of a sudden the cat started throwing up all over the house and the guy who lived there came out of this dark hallway and he was totally green and someone in Mika Miko started freaking out. I think there was something else in the weed, and we had to take her to the emergency room.

Another time this guy was like, “Oh come play our festival” and we had a day off so we were like, “Why not, we’ll just go play our set.” So we finally get there — and it was so out of the way — and he’s like, “You’re playing in the living room.” So we play in the living room and he was literally the only person in the living room watching us, the only other people in there were just walking by to go to the bathroom. Finally, he was like, “Sorry I can’t pay you guys any money because I had to buy the keg just to get people to come here.” We were like “whatever” and ended up stealing one of his pedals.

That made me realize that maybe doing everything yourself doesn’t always work out. At that point I was still booking the tours myself. I realized that if we wanna keep doing this, we have to get a booker.

On the musical aesthetic of Bleached:

Jennifer: In Mika Miko we were just playing straight punk. My favorite bands were Black Flag, Redd Kross, Circle Jerks, TSOL, and that’s what Mika Miko was trying to do. Jesse and I started getting into different kinds of music, like Fleetwood Mac, Rolling Stones, Gun Club. We’re writing songs that are punk, but also rock ‘n’ roll with a little bit of pop. We’ll pretty much write the whole song and I get to sing whatever I wanna sing. With Mika Miko, I was kinda scared to sing about what I wanted because there were so many people’s opinions. In Bleached I feel comfortable and we can experiment and we get to have a lot more control over everything.

On making stuff look cool:

Jennifer: When we first started, we didn’t know if we were gonna take Bleached seriously or not. We didn’t know where we wanted to go with it. We were really excited to have a visual side that wasn’t just live. The record art I really wanted to have a similar look and feel. I think when you look at all our record art, you kind of get the same feeling from each picture. They’re beautiful, but also dark in a way and they say something about love. I got that from the bands I grew up liking. They all have a visual side. It’s also just like taking what you have and expressing it. Like the Smiths records, you know [by looking at it] that it’s a Smiths record or like Black Sabbath art or Rolling Stones. Those are all my favorite bands, so I was inspired by that. If you have a band, why not take the art side of it seriously too, and make it look just as cool as you want it to look?

Jessie: Growing up, our dad was working in the industry as a sound engineer at Universal, so he was around movie sets a lot and we were always visiting him. Someone always had a video camera. I remember even just being in a car and playing some punk song, and someone would just push record on the camera. Sometimes we’d go film our friends skateboarding. Most of it was just fun, but then we started doing little shorts and did some videos for Mika Miko. I have a box of so much footage of us, but I have to find the equipment to set it up to watch it again. There’s so much Super 8 footage from tour that I keep because I’m gonna use it for something.

On making the record:

Jennifer: When we record we have a drummer, but me and Jesse do everything else. I play rhythm guitar and sing and Jessie does lead guitar and bass. When we first started, we just wanted it to be Jessie and I, because we had already been in a band where it was so hectic trying to get everyone together all the time. We were like, “We’ll just do it ourselves.”

On hanging out in the L.A. music scene:

Jennifer: It’s actually been really fun lately. There was a period where there weren’t that many fun bands, then it just started up again. FIDLAR are really good live, and Tangea are really fun live, too. And our friends Chad and the Meatbodies. There was just a festival in Santa Ana called Burgerfest because Burger Records is a label from Santa Ana and it was all these bands that are on Burger, like Gap Dream and they’re so good. That festival was soooooo fuuunnn, just so many kids going crazy. It was insane. I don’t know how many people that place holds, but it must be at least 1000. It was so crazy.

On where they will be 10 years from now:

Jessie: Jen will have her own clothing line. Possibly lingerie. She also wants a flower shop. Next to Jen’s flower shop, I’ll have a restaurant and it will be, like, all the food we ate on tour. Our band will still play shows. Maybe not tour as much — festivals would be cool. In 10 years we’ll be ready to do things at home.

But right now, we’re in this moment with Bleached. This is what we are doing right now. This is what’s in front of us to do. If you wanna go back to school, you can always do that later. This is the right time to be doing Bleached. It’s what we’re supposed to be doing.

File under: Noisy crash pop for art-school kids who like to dance to live music. Melodic guitar-driven songwriting with DIY/punk sensibilities. Scottish nerdcore for girls who put on all-ages shows and collect vinyl.

For fans of: Veronica Falls, Look Blue Go Purple, The Pastels, The Vaselines, Brilliant Colors, Grass Widow

From: Glasgow, Scotland

Personae: Eilidh Rodgers (drums, vocals), Ruari MacLean (guitar, vocals) and Rachel Aggs (guitar and vocals)

I interviewed Golden Grrrls before their show with Brilliant Colors in Olympia; they had just flown from London to Seattle to start their first U.S. tour. We ordered pizza and sat on the floor of Bikini Kill Records HQ to get to know one other. I quickly discovered they’re record nerds who prefer nothing more than to geek out about music: Drummer/vocalist Eilidh Rodgers works in a record store owned by Stephen Pastel where my band, Spider and the Webs, hung out for a day when we played Glasgow. We bonded and immediately started arguing about the Beatles.

Guitarists/vocalists Rachel Aggs and Ruari MacLean picked George as their favorite Beatle, which Rodgers thought was a total cop-out. (Aggs was about to write Harrison a fan letter when he died, so she wrote it and then ceremoniously burnt it in memoriam. At this, MacLean changed his mind and chose Paul.) Rodgers confessed that when she was younger she always picked John, but went with Ringo in the end, possibly for comic relief. In a way, their choices make total sense: Golden Grrrls are interested in pop music and experimenting with forms — like Paul — and in musicianship and aesthetics, like both Paul and George. They have a sense of humor (Ringo), and while they want to be taken seriously, they don’t wanna seem “too serious” (John).

After the interview, we headed to the show. Watching them made me remember hearing the Pastels for the first time, and illustrated an unlikely continuum from ’80s underground to today’s DIY, an international network that connects Olympia to Glasgow.

On the origins of Golden Grrrls:

Rodgers: I started playing the drums in high school. I used to just sit in the front room and play the drums. I used to play along to that film with Tom Hanks, That Thing You Do! It’s pretty silly. I think I really just loved the song. It all started with Tom Hanks didn’t it?

MacLean: The first band I ever played in was my dad’s cover band. Kind of like pub rock — classic jukebox hits. I was 15 or 16 and got to go into a bar and not be thrown out and got paid at the end of the night. My history teacher was the singer.

Aggs: My family plays music too. My mom just started playing double bass and my dad plays banjo and guitar. We play old timey bluegrass music. I play fiddle and mandolin.

On their troublesome name:

MacLean: My grandmother was from West Virginia and I used to watch Golden Girls with her. When I finished University I had to have surgery on my knee so I couldn’t work for like a month or two and I thought, “Now’s a good time to record some songs.” I didn’t think there would be any shows involved. It was just me messing around, like playing the drums and everything. I just thought that’s a silly name because, like, I’m a young guy, I’m not an old woman, there’s one of me, there’s four of them and then somebody had a side project called Golden Girls so I had to change the spelling and now it’s just a big load of trouble.

Rodgers: It’s fine. Who cares, fuckin’ hell!?

MacLean: Then we actually started playing. As stupid as it sounds, when we started playing live, I hadn’t made the connection between there being women in the band and the name at all.

Rodgers: I think it’d be a really bad name if we were all girls. I wouldn’t be in that band.

Aggs: I don’t think it’s a bad thing. I think it’s funny and if people do associate it with riot grrrl that’s not bad. It’s not like that’s a terrible thing to be associated with.

MacLean: I think it’s more that it’s related to a cheesy TV show.

On music and community:

Aggs: I make zines and stuff, I do drawings. In school I studied fine art and I made sound art but I actually just wanted to play music so I felt like I was wasting my time.

Rodgers: I think it’s easier to start playing music than it is to establish yourself as an artist.

Aggs: Music is so instantaneous. If you have an idea and you wanna do something with someone it’s so easy to make a demo and put it out there. It’s easy to communicate in that sense, because you know where the community is gonna be. You can just go play with your friends’ bands. If you make some art, it’s like, “Oh what am I gonna do with this? Where am I gonna exhibit it? Who’s gonna care?”

MacLean: With music there’s a really immediate response.

Rodgers: I think we used to joke that the minute Rachel met someone she liked, she’d say, “Let’s start a band.”

Aggs: Yeah, I need to stop. I’m already in too many bands.

On the ’80s indie-pop aesthetic:

MacLean: It’s easy for people to go “Glasgow, mixed gender…they sound like The Pastels or The Vaselines,” but I don’t have a problem with that.

Aggs: Before I joined the band I really liked Golden Grrrls, but I knew very little about indie pop except for New Zealand stuff. I’d actually never listened to the Pastels before and not really the Vaselines much. So I’ve listened to loads of new music since joining. But I like the band, because it’s really tuneful, fun music and I actually had no reference, which is really nice for me. It’s been fun coming up with guitar parts. What were we listening to? The Byrds and stuff like that.

MacLean: We like a lot of ’60s music, and I’m sure those bands did as well, but I can’t play guitar like [The Byrds'] Roger McGuinn. So maybe if you try and fumble along a little bit, it comes out sounding a little bit like us.

Aggs: When I used to go watch Golden Grrrls, it was really noisy and loud and fun live. I was going to see hardcore punk bands and stuff as well, and it was a similar thing. Me and my friend put them on in his bedroom, in a really small bedroom, and people were moshing and stuff.

Rodgers: There weren’t enough mic stands, so there was a mic attached to a mop or a broom or something.

Aggs: Golden Grrrl’s has a soft side but it has a crazy side too.

On the current DIY scene:

MacLean: The UK scene is looking pretty healthy just now with some cool new spaces and promoters doing shows, like Riots Not Diets in Brighton, Neen Records in Newcastle and the Audacious Art Experiment space in Sheffield. And promoters like Upset the Rhythm in London and Comfortable on a Tightrope in Manchester are amazing.

Rodgers: Before Rachel joined Golden Grrrls she was on tour in Glasgow with her band Trash Kit and Grass Widow, and we played in Glasgow together, and it was really great.

Aggs: Silverfox are one of my favorite bands in the UK at the moment.

MacLean: I think people like us like a broad range of stuff from different years. We toured with Edible Arrangements from Brighton.

Aggs: They’re amazing. They’ve got organ and guitar. They play spooky horror-movie music.

MacLean: We played with another band called Sex Hands, from Manchester. They sound completely different than us and completely different than Edible Arrangements. All the bands are totally different but there’s a love of melody and using that as a basis for making something.

Rodgers: I think it’s more interesting when you play with people who are into different things and you can meet in the middle somewhere.

Aggs: I had to learn to play guitar properly to join Golden Grrrls. Scales!

Rodgers: If you actually know how to play, you’d just play the same as the next guy. But if you’re kind of struggling —

MacLean: I’m constantly struggling.

Rodgers: — It sounds nice.

File under: '70s country folk with hints of rustic psychedelia and spiritual malaise

For fans of: Bonnie "Prince" Billy, Iron & Wine, The Black Twig Pickers

From: North Carolina via California

Personae: Primarily Michael Taylor (guitar, mandolin, voice), but occasionally Scott Hirsch (bass, guitar) and Terry Lonergan (drums)

It feels odd to ask “Who is…?” of a guy who has been making music for nearly 20 years, but veteran Michael Taylor is just now finding his largest audience with Hiss Golden Messenger. It’s actually his third band, following the short-lived punk group Ex-Ignota and the longer-lived San Francisco alt-country act The Court & Spark. When the latter broke up in 2007 — after four albums and nearly a decade of near-constant touring — Taylor settled down in Durham, North Carolina, where he started a family, pursued a degree in folklore, and made music more as a hobby than as a priority.

Over several albums — a few self-released, a few more via North Carolina indie label Paradise of Bachelors — Hiss Golden Messenger has alternated between an austere solo acoustic project for Taylor and a full band featuring Scott Hirsh on guitar and Terry Lonergan on drums. For Haw, the fourth and arguably best release under the HGM moniker, they added members of Lambchop, Megafaun and the Black Twig Pickers to the line-up.

Whether alone or with friends, however, the primary elements of Hiss Golden Messenger remain constant: Taylor’s voice, which sounds both genial and mysterious, and his lyrics, which examine thorny issues of faith, fidelity, and family. Stephen M. Deusner caught up with Taylor to discuss North Carolina, the South, and that strange little word “haw.”

On growing up in a musical family:

My father is a musician. When he was growing up during the early to mid ’60s, the folk revival was a really big part of what was going on in the country. He went to high school with Steve Martin, who, besides being a comedian, is a huge fan of bluegrass. The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band and Jackson Browne also went to that school. So he had an interest folk music, and that was how I heard a lot of the music that ended up being the points of entry into traditional folk and country. It’s not that far from the Byrds to Merle Haggard to Doc Watson to The Anthology of American Folk Music.

On moving to North Carolina:

I draw a lot of inspiration from Southern music. It’s one of the big reasons why we ended up here. I felt like I needed to live in the South to understand the music that I love so well. I think about region as very specific places, like there was a time when people could hear a song and they could tell what county is was from. I don’t think my music works the same way, but there’s certainly a sense of place in Hiss Golden Messenger records. I feel very connected to this place. This is my home. We bought a house here. Our son was born here. Our daughter will be born in July and she’ll be a North Carolina native. I’m proud to live here and make music here.

On being a non-Southerner playing Southern music:

I would never refer to myself as a Southerner. That is reserved for people who are born and raised here. I do have a deep appreciation for what the South has given to American culture. I’m certainly using Southern instrumentation and song forms in my music, but I’m not discussing Southern issues or concerns as much as I’m talking about what is going on in my heart and in my head.

On the word “Haw”:

I think of this record as a very dark record, certainly the darkest that I’ve made. And I thought there was something a little comical about calling it Haw, if you think of haw as laughter. It’s the name of a river in this region that I live very close to. There’s Hee Haw, too, which was a great show. It perpetuated a lot of stereotypes that people certainly disagreed with, but on the other hand, it presented a lot of incredible music. It’s a complicated show.

On Hiss Golden Messenger as a solo vs. band project:

I don’t write with a band. I write by myself. There are a lot of parts of Hiss Golden Messenger that are very solitary. When I started Hiss Golden Messenger in earnest, I was pretty isolated out here and I was concerned with writing these internal narratives and puzzling out personal issues I was dealing with. So Hiss Golden Messenger is me and whoever is playing me. If I’m playing with a band, then Scott Hirsch is going to be there. He recorded Haw, he mixed it, he played bass and a bunch of other stuff on there. And Terry Lonergan is really crucial to the full band records we make.

On confronting spiritual issues in song:

I was talking to someone about this last weekend and was flipping through some notebooks. I always have multiple notebooks with me, and as I was trying to sum up the record with a concise thesis, I flipped to a page that read, “I will not pray in fear.” This record is me trying to understand my inner life, my spiritual place in the world. Is faith rooted in fear or is it rooted in peace? I have a lot of questions, but I don’t have any answers to them. It can be frustrating. And I’m not convinced that my ideas of faith and spirituality are getting any clearer they older I get. In fact, I think they’re getting hazier. Let me say, I’m not a churchgoing person. I think the Bible is a great book and also incredibly flawed. I don’t know what my idea of God is. That’s what these records are about.

On re-recording old songs for new albums:

I’ve recorded a bunch of my songs a couple of times. [Haw features a new version of "The Serpent Is Kind (Compared to Man)," which originally appeared on 2010's Bad Debt.] There’s a long history in traditional music of people re-recording songs, but it’s not something that happens so much in the independent music world. I don’t like the idea of a recording of a song being static. These things should live. Certainly the ideas being presented in these songs are worth revisiting over and over again, because a lot of times the words just come through me and I don’t even fully understand them. So it’s good to go back and sing them again, although some of them can be very painful to record and talk to people about. But I think it’s a good pain.

On being part of North Carolina’s music scene:

People have been very kind and welcoming to me here, although I feel like I’m still sort of an outlier — for purely logistical reasons, though. For a multitude of reasons, I’m not out and about very much. But there is a brotherhood — or sisterhood — of musicians in this region that feels very special and very different from other places I’ve lived. For how small of a place it is, there’s a very high ratio of really incredible bands: Megafaun, Mount Moriah, Mountain Goats, Spider Bags, It’s endless. I’m very close with Phil and Brad Cook [of Megafaun]. Phil played on most of Haw. The entire cultural scene here is just really vibrant, from food to writing to music to visual art. It’s a beautiful place to be. To put it this way, my wife and I just bought a house, and I hired Ash Bowie of Polvo to do the electrical work.

File under: Experimental post-punk with haunting, reverb-soaked vocals

For fans of: Sonic Youth, Broadcast, Cat Power

From: Oslo, Norway (by way of Midland, Michigan)

Personae: Carmen Hillestad

Though modeling might sound like a dream job to some, Carmen Hillestad looked the part in front of the camera, but was all the while dreaming of another fantasy occupation. Music was always on her mind, beckoning her to abandon the silence of magazine shoots and finally unveil the songs that had been incubating in secret for six or seven years.

Her earliest musical endeavors involved classical piano and clarinet lessons but upon falling in love with the electric guitar, she turned lo-fi multi-instrumentalist, eschewing perfectionism for the beauty of off-kilter beats and bent waves of distortion. Her otherworldly vocals and noisy cut-and-paste experiments that pile layer upon layer of wandering guitar lines, hypnotic loops and primal beats eventually caught the ear of Emil Nikolaisen (of the Oslo noise-pop band Serena-Maneesh). He soon joined forces with Hillestad, co-producing and playing drums and keyboards on her entrancing debut album Sleeper and subsequently connecting her to the venerable Oslo indie label Smalltown Supersound.

Hillestad now technically lives in London, but she’s spent much of the last three years in Norway recording, mixing and performing. While Hillestad was winding down from a music festival in Oslo, she spoke with eMusic’s Amre Klimchak about her love of lo-fi rock, finding her voice, and making the leap to full-time musician.

On becoming an experimental multi-instrumentalist:

I’ve always played instruments. I started learning the piano when I was about eight or nine, and I also played the clarinet, so I learned a lot about musical theory. I stopped playing piano when I was about 15 because I got bored — I was a stupid teenager. I wasn’t necessarily bored of the piano, but I was kind of bored of the restrictive method I was learning. It was very classical training, and I was more interested in learning the pieces quickly so I could sit and improvise, or play the pieces a lot faster and keep the sustain pedal in — because I like reverb a lot, as you probably can imagine from listening to the music now. What properly brought me into writing music again was being given [an electric] guitar [at age 19], and sitting by myself and playing on it and experimenting with different pedals.

On being influenced by American hip-hop, ’90s guitar rock, experimental post-punk and world music:

When I started playing the guitar I mainly listened to hip-hop. It was very much Wu-Tang and that whole crowd, the kind of slightly darker, a little bit psychedelic hip-hop, as well as the popular stuff like Dr. Dre. I was really into the beats. Guitar music was always around as well. It was the ’90s, and there was a lot of great stuff going on like Nirvana, Sonic Youth and the whole New York thing. And after a little while I started discovering stuff like This Heat and Sun City Girls and world music, and it all came in bits and pieces.

On being attracted to lo-fi music:

For a long, long time, even as a young teenager, I was always drawn to the stuff that wasn’t perfect, that was slightly off or a bit dark, something slightly weird and lurking around. I find the less perfect things are, the more beautiful and effective they are. Sun City Girls, especially, a lot of their stuff is so terribly bad that it’s admirable that they just went for it and put it out there anyway. I always like something that’s on the edge rather than something that’s perfect and produced too well.

On leaving modeling and becoming a full-time musician three years ago:

I decided to become a musician, to take that step, because I felt like there was something that might be worth trying for. Before that, I wasn’t sure whether it was good enough yet to risk leaving a well-paid job for, because it’s kind of crazy. But at the same time, I was very tired of that whole job. It was a decent work life for a while, and it was interesting for a couple of years. But I didn’t feel like I was learning anything new anymore, and I didn’t feel like I was providing anything that mattered or of substance. You’re meant to be silent all the time, and I was tired of it.

On being introduced to Emil Nikolaisen:

I showed a couple of my songs to a really good friend of mine, and she was like, “That’s cool. I’m doing an art exhibition, and you should play.” And I thought, “Oh, Jesus. How scary.” So I had to throw myself out onto it. Her show was in Norway. I played and a friend of a friend of mine saw it, and he’s in music. He thought there was something there. So we started talking, and I sent him a few more tracks, and he was like, “You have to meet Emil.” I was like, “Who’s Emil?”

So he talked to Emil Nikolaisen, who is basically the mastermind behind Serena-Maneesh, and Emil listened to the tracks and was like, “This is actually quite good.” In the beginning, he was a bit skeptical — as I would be as well if I was told what I did. A month after we met for the first time, we started recording. I was really lucky to work with him, because he is incredibly passionate and goes into the project like there’s no tomorrow.

On recording with Nikolaisen in a decommissioned nuclear bunker:

I was in a weird place in my life, so it was almost like a live-or-die situation emotionally. Emil’s very intense, and I think I’m pretty damn intense, so the combination of the two of us…A couple of sessions went from 10 in the morning to 5 or 6 the next morning, and we went all night. The other thing was that we were recording in this old bomb shelter in Oslo, and we didn’t see the sun, so we forgot what time it was quite often. It was a great experience, actually, the whole thing. And I guess there’s definitely a feeling of entering a slightly different world in quite a lot of [the music].

On the inspiration for the album title Sleeper:

Lyrically, the album’s about detachment and this need to sleep and escape everyday life, because I just felt very detached for a long time. So “sleeper” is a small joke toward my family and friends, but also it just felt like the right title for the theme of the album.

I was just mentally not in the right place in life, and I didn’t feel like I was doing anything particularly of substance. I felt a bit detached, and there was always a sense of not belonging somewhere.

On choosing the name “Carmen Villain” for her musical project:

I felt like I needed a sense of detachment from my previous name, because there’s a lot of judgment based on what I’ve done before. I felt like I needed a bit of distance from it. There wasn’t that much thought that went into it; I [just] wanted something different from what my name might represent to some people. I just like the word [villain]. It’s a word that I’ve always loved since I was a tiny kid. It looks great, and it feels good. It’s just a vibe, I guess.