fish narc x GAG
Holy Fawn
Arizona quartet HOLY FAWN bring an amalgamation of blackened-shoegaze and atmospheric post-metal; imbued with their somber textures, crushing wall of sound, and haunting imagery of nature and dream-like states, HOLY FAWN has made waves touring alongside bands like Thrice, Deafheaven, Rolo Tomassi, across North America and Europe.
Florist
On Jellywish Florist invite listeners to question everything — to imagine a world where magic, surrealism, and the supernatural are our companions in day-to-day life. It dares to present a realm of possibility and imagination in a time that feels evermore prescriptive, limiting, and awful. The album finds Florist exploring life’s big questions without offering silver linings, morals, or definitive answers. Instead, the band asks perhaps the most difficult of questions: Is it possible to break free from our ingrained thought cycles and pedestrian way of life? That, Florist posits, may be the only way to be truly happy, fulfilled, and free. Singer, guitarist, and principal songwriter Emily Sprague says that the record is purposely complicated. “It’s a gentle delivery of something that is really chaotic, confusing, and multifaceted,” she explains. “It has this technicolor that’s inspired by our world and also fantasy elements that we can use to escape our world.” “We enter an observational fever dream about floating through liminal space between lifetimes, individual perceptions. There is reflection on our connectedness in joy and suffering through the wish for a peaceful place for our spirits to live and land,” Sprague explains. “‘Have Heaven’ establishes the world of the album to be not quite always lucid, but rather a perspective that is blended into the worlds of the magic and death realms swirling around us. The chorus is a chant that pleads for a better symbiosis between these worlds, and between our earthly forms trying to survive alongside each other, bound to the systems we must exist within.” Jellywish is an exercise in multidimensional world building. The album’s panoramic cover art, which looks like something out of a Henry Darger volume, wraps the music in a collage of color that presents as science fiction-adjacent, hinting at something mysterious, fantastical, and mythological. Inside the album’s jacket, however, are tender and catchy sonic meditations on life’s most knotty subjects: life, death, earth, reality, relationships, joy, and pain. Taken together, Florist offers an acute sense of the band at this moment, one that worries about the world and its place in it. In contrast, it also presents an alternative to the doldrums of day-to-day life, and the necessary suggestion that very different things may be true at the same time. With Jellywish, Florist offers a complex album in a time that is anything but simple. In mining the chaos and wonder of physical and spiritual worlds, the band holds a mirror to itself to the great benefit of all. It tells us that we are not alone, and challenges us to believe in magic.
Worry Club
Worry Club is the moniker of Chicago-based indie musician Chase Walsh. Walsh integrates dreamy synth-pop guitar and muted percussion into gritty and unflinching lyricism. He looks depression and heartbreak dead in the face with his poetry, packaging these difficult subjects into truly gorgeous songs.
The Criticals
The Criticals are a Nashville based rock band formed by Parker Forbes and Cole Shugart. The Criticals have proven themselves a powerful and fierce duo — one with both a diverse musical appetite in songwriting and a whiplash live show that’s drawn sellout crowds in major US markets including New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago. The band recently released their highly regarded EP Front Door Confrontations and continued a steady diet of raucous live shows across the country. The band are now set to release a handful of singles leading up to their debut album release on Fantasy Records in 2025.
Kevin McClure
BabyJake
Florida-born Jake Herring, known professionally as BabyJake, may have appeared to be an overnight success, but his journey to the spotlight was anything but instantaneous. His hit single Cigarettes on Patios took off in 2019, garnering 200M+ streams and earning him a certified gold record and a major label deal. He would release two albums from the same vine, until the upheaval of the pandemic saw him splitting with his label and at a pivotal turning point. But giving up was never an option for Jake, and his resilience set him on a new path: an ascetic journey to rediscover himself, shedding his shag haircut in favor of a buzzcut, naked skin marked by the tattoos he collected along his journey. He found the answer on his latest album Beautiful Blue Collar Boy, a bouquet of songs rooted in the beauties and hardships of day to day life. Drawing influence from the likes of Bob Dylan, Tom Petty, and Jeff Tweedy, BabyJake stays true to his north star of confident storytelling and songwriting. On Beautiful Blue Collar Boy, Jake trades in the late night parties for the simplicity of authenticity, hard work, and a meaningful life to come home to. This chapter of BabyJake reveals a man stripped down to his American roots, with each song painting a small vignette of BabyJake’s blue collar dreams. Now planted in Nashville, TN, Jake returns to us as a Beautiful Blue Collar Boy.
Marlon Funaki
Bay Faction
Borne out of an online message board, Bay Faction emerged in the Boston DIY scene in 2015 with the debut of their self-titled record. It was the first release on Counter Intuitive Records with the band’s album pressed on highly coveted vinyl. Following its release, Bay Faction spent 2 years rigorously touring nationwide, developing a cult-like following. After graduation, the band relocated to New York, and camped out in a suburban New Jersey basement to write and record their sophomore record Florida Guilt. The record marked a departure from their earlier style, trading in a conventional rock setup for sampled drums, synths, and vocal processing, embodying the ethos they had long sought to define. Highsnobiety named Bay Faction as “your favorite band you haven’t heard of yet” and nationwide touring ensued to promote their album. On the heels of the pandemic, Bay Faction bid farewell with the release of Swan Dive, their final song before entering hiatus. Now, in 2024, the band relaunched with a sold out tour and release of new singles Drive Home, Eye Sore, and Sunshine, from their highly anticipated forthcoming EP.
buffchick
