On April 4th, Greek Artist Σtella (pronounced Stella) will release her mesmerizing new record Adagio on CD/LP/DSPs from Sub Pop. Adagio is a pop record that feels like a warm blanket; it swaddles its listeners with nylon-string guitars, featherlight percussion, psychedelic keyboards, and staccato drums. Written and recorded over the span of five years with a consortium of international collaborators, including !!!’s Rafael Cohen and British songwriter Gabriel Stebbing, Adagio is a 27-minute meditation on love and desire, rest, and time. The album was produced by Σtella and mixed by Edmund Irwin-Singer. Though the bulk of it is sung in English, as all her records have been, Σtella also delivers her first two songs in Greek, “Omorfo Mou,” and a cover of a 1969 cult classic of the Greek New Wave, Litsa Sakellariou’s “Ta Vimata.”

Today, you can watch the captivating new video for the album’s title track, “Adagio,” which was Directed by Debora Maité. Click here to watch.
 
Adagio follows the release of her 2022 Sub Pop debut, Up and Away, which has catapulted her beyond three million monthly Spotify listeners and has secured key licensing placements in the MAX show Industry and an online H&M Clothing commercial.
 
Adagio is now available to preorder from Sub Pop. LP preorders from the Sub Pop Mega Mart (North America), Mega Mart 2 (UK/EU), and independent retailers worldwide will receive the album on Clear Pink vinyl in North America and white vinyl in the EU.
 
More about Σtella’s Adagio
 
Almost as soon as Stella Chronopoulou began writing Adagio, her fifth album as Σtella, she knew the time had finally come to sing in Greek, her native tongue. It would be a first. She started the record almost by accident in 2019, during an 11-hour boat ride to the island of Anafi. Σtella had recently gone through a patch of personal turmoil and needed a break from home. On the ferry, she pulled out her cell phone as the boat clipped through the Mediterranean and began with a simple melody, steadily piecing together a rough instrumental. As psychedelic keyboards twinkled and swayed above staccato drums, the track suggested some deep exhalation, as if Σtella were letting go of long-unnecessary baggage. For a spell, she set the instrumental aside. She understood the words would eventually need to be in Greek, given how and where she’d written it, the mood of the moment. But she wasn’t ready yet, or in a rush.
 
Σtella, after all, grew up in a slow place. Truth be told, she wasn’t very far away from the hubbub of Athens, Greece, living just above the historic city in a relatively rural suburb. When her father bought land there several decades ago, his friends joked wolves may eat him. For Σtella, though, it was an idyll: The sounds of passing goats woke her most mornings. She and her friends played unfettered in empty streets, not worried about cars or permission. At night, doors remained unlocked. The living felt easy.
 
But during the last decade, life has steadily become busier for Σtella, who now lives near downtown Athens. She has become one of modern Greece’s most popular musical exports, with five sophisticated and playful pop albums rendered with international élan. After releasing her Sub Pop debut, Up and Away, in 2022, she soon catapulted beyond three million monthly Spotify listeners. That success was a blessing, of course, but Σtella still sometimes found herself pining for the slower pace of her youth.
 
That longing is the thread that loosely binds together her fifth album, the entrancing Adagio. Borrowing its name, of course, from the term for music that’s meant to be played slowly, Adagio is a pop record that feels like a very warm blanket, its nylon-string guitars and featherlight percussion swaddling its listeners for three minutes at a time. Written and recorded over the span of five years, with a consortium of international collaborators including !!!’s Rafael Cohen and British songwriter Gabriel Stebbing, Adagio is a 27-minute meditation on love and desire, rest and time. Though the bulk of it is indeed sung in English, as all her records have been, Σtella also delivers her first two songs in Greek here—“Omorfo Mou,” the one that began on the boat, and a cover of a 1969 cult classic of the Greek New Wave, Litsa Sakelariou’s “Ta Vimata.” It is a sign of the self-assurance that radiates throughout these tender and smitten little tunes.
 
During the Covid-19 pandemic, Σtella opted to try some new approaches to writing. Upon the suggestion of a mutual friend, she began exchanging emails with !!!’s Cohen (working now under the name Las Palabras), each sharing links to records and sounds they loved. There was an instant chemistry, and they penned five songs through Zoom and email. (They’ve yet to meet.) Three of them provide the framework for Adagio. There’s “Baby Brazil,” a suave tune about falling for someone, about letting go of the need to control everything. Together, Cohen and Σtella found a spellbinding intersection of Tropicalia, disco, and yé-yé. Pushing and pulling between verses of nylon-stringed guitars and choruses where soft strings and electronics rise like bioluminescent tides, “80 Days” suggests giving into desire and into this song’s sweet sweep.
 
But the pair’s hallmark here is the opening title cut, “Adagio,” where Σtella sings to the concept of slowness like some long-lost lover. “I want you to know I hear you, Adagio” she offers over gentle samba percussion and jangling chords. “Why you’re tormenting me?” Her guitar solo then cuts through it with a Wes Montgomery verve, curling like a finger that beckons an object of desire. Maybe it seems strange to write a love song to the idea of slowing down, but who hasn’t felt that way in our era of instant everything—the desire to step back and let the world just come to you? When Σtella sings here, it’s hard not to long for that same state of grace. You can hear it again in the mesmerizing instrumental “Corfu” and the sashaying love song “Can I Say,” written in memoriam for Σtella’s stolen bike.
 
A few years after that boat ride across the Mediterranean, Σtella finally revisited the instrumental she had written on board. She’d always resisted writing and singing in Greek because its words often felt too heavy and intense, the tone not suited to her lilting songs. Still, she knew this one had to be Greek. She thought about the beautiful phrase “Omorfo Mou,” a common pledge of Greek adoration that loosely translates into “my beautiful one.” It soon became a song of want and longing, the antithesis of the way she felt back on the boat, when she was getting away from rather than going toward anything. What’s more, its swaggering rhythm only emerges after Σtella’s winning cover of “Ta Vimata.” The bass and percussion bounce beneath her curling voice, faithful and new, linking her to a lineage of sophisticated Greek pop and the country’s famed New Wave. Two circles close with these two songs, a kind of dual homecoming.
 
Start to finish, Σtella sounds more at ease and comfortable than she’s ever been on Adagio. No, these fetching songs will not slow her career or grant her that title track’s wish. Still, for half an hour, Adagio does add an extra measure of warmth to the world, with time loosening its grip even if it doesn’t slow down.

Σtella
Adagio
 
Track Listing:
1. Adagio
2. Ta Vimata
3. Omorfo Mou
4. Baby Brazil feat. Las Palabras
5. Can I Say
6. 80 Days
7. Too Poor
8. Corfu
9. Caravan

On March 14th, 2025, Sub Pop will release Clipping’s sixth album, Dead Channel Sky, the group’s long-awaited Cyberpunk and Hip Hop project. The album features the previously released tracks “Run It” and “Keep Pushing,” along with the highlights “Welcome Home Warrior (Feat. Aesop Rock),” “Code,” and today’s offering, “Change the Channel.”
 
Dead Channel Sky also features guest appearances from Nels Cline, Bitpanic, Tia Nomore, and Sub Pop labelmates Cartel Madras, and was produced and mixed by Clipping and Steve Kaplan and mastered by Levi Seitz at Black Belt Mastering. Dead Channel Sky follows the release of the group’s acclaimed horrorcore series Visions of Bodies Being Burned (2020) and There Existed an Addiction to Blood (2019), also available from Sub Pop.
 
In the coming days, Clipping will also share the intense official video for “Change the Channel” directed by Merawi Gerima. 
 
Clipping are also announcing headlining North American tour dates in support of Dead Channel Sky, which begins March 14th with a hometown show in Los Angeles at The Echoplex and May 3rd in Sacramento at Goldfield. Clipping will appear at Knoxville’s Big Ears Festival on Saturday, March 29th, 2025. Please find a complete list of dates below.
 

 
Dead Channel Sky will be available on CD/2xLP/DSPs from Sub Pop. LP preorders from megamart.subpop.com (US) and Mega Mart 2 (UK/EU) and your local record store will receive the limited Loser edition vinyl on Emerald/Forest Green Ghostly Mashup (North America) and Neon Pink (UK/Europe). There is also a Silver vinyl edition available from independent retailer Rough Trade in the US and UK (All limited edition vinyl colors are available while stock lasts!). The Dead Channel Sky album art was created by Designers Republic.
 

Because of their mix of hellified gangster shit and progressive compositions, I once jokingly called Clipping “Deathrow Tull.” Well, it’s not a joke anymore. While their last few projects have been record-long concepts like the classic prog rock of old, Dead Channel Sky is mixtape-like, a carefully curated collection of songs in which every track is a love letter to a possible present. Like a mashup of distinct elements, the overall concept is there, but the result is brief glimpses into a world rather than an overview of it. It sounds crisp and classic at the same time. When something strikes us as retrospective and futuristic at the same time, it’s a reminder of how slipshod our present moment truly is.
 
In my book Dead Precedents: How Hip-Hop Defines the Future, I draw what Walter Benjamin would call correspondences between early hip-hop culture and cyberpunk literature, the binary stars of the solar system at the end of the millennium. I exploit their similarities to illustrate how the cultural practices of hip-hop have informed the cultural practices of the now. Hip-hop was borne of the post-apocalyptic scene in the South Bronx in the early 1970s. Its repurposing of outmoded technology, the hand-styled hieroglyphic screennames on every colorfast surface, and the gyrating dance moves—an entire culture forged from the freshest of what was available at hand—mirrors the post-apocalyptic techno-scrounge of William Gibson’s Neuromancer, Rudy Rucker’s Software, and other early works by the contributors to Bruce Sterling’s Mirrorshades anthology (Pat Cadigan, John Shirley, Lewis Shiner, and Sterling himself, among others). Add the leather-clad mohawks of Afrika Bambaataa and the Soulsonic Force or Rammellzee’s B-boy battle armor and a blend of the two comes further into focus.
 
Juxtaposing high-tech, corporate command-and-control systems (the “cyber”) with the lo-fi, D.I.Y. underground (the “punk”), cyberpunk proper starts in 1982 and ends in 1999, from Blade Runner to The Matrix. There are works before and works since that embody the visions and values of cyberpunk, but these dates act as rough parameters for their assimilation into the larger social sphere, for the time it took cyberpunk to become cyberculture. In the meantime, hip-hop matured, went through its Golden Era, then melted into further forms. Over the same decades, it went from “Planet Rock” to “Bring da Ruckus” to “Hard Knock Life,” from Fab 5 Freddy to Public Enemy to Missy Elliott, from Run-DMC to N.W.A. to Notorious B.I.G. While other genres flirted with it, hip-hop was fickle and fey. Any tryst with the odd bedfellow was a one-night stand at best. Rap and rock birthed mutant offspring maligned by most, and hip-hop’s relations with electronica rarely fared any better.
 
Those twin suns—hip-hop and cyberpunk—both rose in the 1970s and warmed the wider world during the 1980s and 1990s. What if someone explicitly merged them into one set and sound? After all, both movements are the result of hacking the haunted leftovers of a war-torn culture that’s long since moved on.
 
On Dead Channel Sky, Clipping texture-map the twin histories of hip-hop and cyberpunk onto an alternate present where Rammellzee and Bambaataa are the superheroes of old; where Cybotron and Mantronix are the reigning legends; where Egyptian Lover and Freestyle are debated endlessly, and Ultramag and Public Enemy are the undeniable forefathers; where the lost movements of the 1980s and the 1990s are still happening: rave, trip-hop, hip-house, acid house, drum & bass, big beat—the detritus of a different timeline, the survivors of armed audio warfare. That war at thirty-three and a third, its atrocities imprinted upon yet another generation, what someone once called, “the presence of the significance of things” without a hint of ambiguity.
 
Clipping are very story-oriented. They deal in ontology and narrative as much as beats and rhymes. They’ve been approaching making music like writing science fiction since the band’s conception. Two of their records have been nominated for Hugo Awards (one of science fiction’s top literary prizes), and a novella spun-off from their music was nominated for a third. As Clipping, they’ve collaborated with as many of their fellow experimental noise artists as they have fellow rappers. Here those co-conspirators include everyone from the guitarist Nels Cline on the outro to “Dodger” (titled “Malleus”) to their labelmates Cartel Madras on “Mirrorshades, pt. 2,” rapper/actor Tia Nomore on “Scams,” as well the wordy wordsmith Aesop Rock on “Welcome Home Warrior.” Diggs is known for intricate lyrics and rapid-fire rapping, and the tracks that Snipes and Hutson build in the background are no less complex. On “Code,” they sample narrated memories from the Afrofuturist documentary The Last Angel of History; and on “Dominator,” they repurpose a line from the classic Dutch hardcore track “Dominator” by Human Resource. All of the above serves to give us a glimpse of an adjacent possible present, where hip-hop and cyberpunk are one culture.
 
Binary stars are often perceived as one object when viewed with the naked eye. Like those twin sun systems, it’ll take some special equipment and some discerning attention to pull the stars apart on this record. As Diggs barks on the fire-starting “Change the Channel”: Everything is very important!

Clipping
Dead Channel Sky
 
CD + Digital Tracklisting:
1. Intro
2. Dominator
3. Change the Channel
4. Run It
5. Go
6. Simple Degradation (Plucks 1-13) (with Bitpanic)
7. Code
8. Dodger
9. Malleus (with Nels Cline)
10. Scams (feat. Tia Nomore)
11. Keep Pushing
12. “From Bright Bodies” (Interlude)
13. Mood Organ
14. Polaroids
15. Simple Degradation (Plucks 14-18) (with Bitpanic)
16. Madcap
17. Mirrorshades pt. 2 (feat. Cartel Madras)
18. “And You Called” (Interlude)
19. Welcome Home Warrior (feat. Aesop Rock)
20. Ask What Happened
 
2xLP Tracklisting:
A1. Intro
A2. Dominator
A3. Change the Channel
A4. Run It
A5. Go
B1. Code
B2. Dodger
B3. Malleus (with Nels Cline)
B4. Scams (ft. Tia Nomore)
C1. Keep Pushing
C2. Mood Organ
C3. Polaroids
C4. Madcap
D1. Mirrorshades pt. 2 (ft. Cartel Madras)
D2. Welcome Home Warrior (ft. Aesop Rock)
D3. Ask What Happened

Seattle’s Deep Sea Diver will release Billboard Heart, their fourth album, and wide-screened Sub Pop debut worldwide on Friday, February 28th, 2025. The new long-player includes the previously released title track, along with highlights “What Do I Know,” “Emergency,” “Let Me Go,” her collaboration with Grammy-winner Madison Cunningham, and today’s offering, the guttural new single “Shovel.”
 
Billboard Heart immediately puts Deep Sea Diver in the company of St. Vincent, TV on the Radio, and Flock of Dimes, bands that have found newly ornate and magnetic ways to make indie rock by discarding notions of how it must sound or what it must say. Dobson punches through her past here. As she howls during Billboard Heart’s rapturous title track, she is “welcoming the future by letting go of it.”
 
It is a coup, a triumph over self-doubt in which what first felt like failure became an opportunity to find new freedom, belief, and strength. You can hear it in each of these eleven songs, the beating heart that makes everything here feel like a new anthem for finding your own way forward.
 
Billboard Heart was written and performed by primary songwriter and guitar player Jessica Dobson, and her partner, drummer and band co-writer Peter Mansen, and synth player Elliot Jackson. Additional contributions include former The Shins’ bandmate Yuuki Matthews, Caroline Rose, and Greg Leisz. Billboard Heart was produced by Jessica Dobson and Andy D. Park, with additional production from Adam Schatz, mixed by Park, and mastered by Greg Calbi and Steve Fallone.

You can now watch the single-take official video for “Shovel,” directed by Tyler Kalberg and Deep Sea Diver. Dobson says of the track and visual, “‘Shovel’ is one of the most angular and dualistic songs I’ve written, and I wanted to do a one-shot video that captured the grit, rawness, and intensity of the song. Simply put, it is me digging and dancing with a shovel in the middle of the night, desperately looking for beauty in dark places. Influenced by Lynch, the Cohen brothers, Nick Cave, and the sweet dance moves of Kate Bush.” 

Deep Sea Diver has also announced a headlining North American tour in support of Billboard Heart, which begins Saturday, March 29th in Walla Walla, WA at The Motor Co. and runs through Saturday, May 17th with a hometown show in Seattle at the Showbox at the Market. Fan presales begin Wednesday, January 8th at 10 am ET, with tickets for these shows on sale to the general public on Friday, January 10th at 10 am (local). For more information on tickets, visit Deep Sea Diver’s tour dates page. Please find a complete list of dates below. 
 

 
Billboard Heart will be available on CD/LP/DSPs from Sub Pop. LP preorders from megamart.subpop.com (US), Mega Mart 2 (UK/EU), Deep Sea Diver’s Official Website, Bandcamp, and your local record store will receive the limited Loser edition vinyl on Transparent Pink (North America), Glacial Blue (Bandcamp North America), and Opaque Pink (UK/Europe) (All limited edition vinyl colors available while stock lasts!). The Billboard Heart cover image is shot by photographer Neil Krug and from his “Spirit II” photo series.
 

 
In the middle of July 2023, in a Los Angeles studio, Deep Sea Diver mastermind Jessica Dobson took a guitar solo but somehow felt nothing. Just days earlier, her Seattle band played a series of semi-secret shows for devotees at a hometown bar, de facto rehearsals for cutting a new record. The sets had gone well, but, almost immediately, the sessions didn’t. The songs’ essence seemed muddled, Dobson’s conviction lost somewhere in the 1,000 miles between Southern California and the home studio she shares with partner, drummer, and frequent cowriter Peter Mansen. On that first night in Los Angeles, she broke down, wondering what she was doing there, what her band could do to fix it. For the first time ever, Deep Sea Diver retreated, heading home without an album. Did they need to scrap it all, to begin again with new material?
 
Not at all: Following a brief break, Dobson found a renewed sense of self, a trust in her vision for her band and songs and her ability to capture them. After that Los Angeles hiccup, longtime collaborator Andy Park asked Dobson how the new stuff was going over an early fall dinner. She admitted she needed help. In that humbling confession, she soon found ways of working that helped her reimagine and reinvigorate Deep Sea Diver and led directly to the power and brilliance of Billboard Heart, Deep Sea Diver’s fourth album and first for Sub Pop. It is a coup, a triumph over self-doubt in which what first felt like failure became an opportunity to find new freedom, belief, and strength. You can hear it in each of these 11 songs, the beating heart that makes everything here feel like a new anthem for finding your own way forward.
 
The cocksure Bad Seeds swagger of “Shovel,” the tender mercies of “Loose Change,” the serpentine machinations of “Let Me Go,” where Dobson tangles with fellow guitar dynamo Madison Cunningham: Billboard Heart immediately puts Deep Sea Diver in the company of St. Vincent, TV on the Radio, and Flock of Dimes, bands that have found newly ornate and magnetic ways to make indie rock by discarding notions of how it must sound or what it must say. Dobson punches through her past here. As she howls during Billboard Heart’s rapturous title track, she is “welcoming the future by letting go of it (read more at Sub Pop).

Deep Sea Diver
Billboard Heart
 
Tracklisting:
1. Billboard Heart
2. What Do I Know
3. Emergency
4. Shovel
5. Tiny Threads
6. Loose Change
7. Always Waving Goodbye
8. Let Me Go (feat. Madison Cunningham)
9. Be Sweet
10. See in the Dark
11. Happiness Is Not a Given

The Gits Live at The X-Ray is a new live album featuring recordings from the band’s June 1993 set featuring 14 tracks recorded at the famed Portland, Oregon nightclub that is out today worldwide Friday, December 13th on all DSPs from Sub Pop. Listen to a new live recording of the song “Whirlwind” now!

On a related note, you can watch a fully restored and remastered live performance of “Wingo Lamo,” filmed live at Seattle’s RKCNDY. The live visual features original film footage courtesy of DC9 and Douglas Pray from his 1993 documentary, Hype!. 

Sub Pop recently shared the news that we are the new home of The Gits, the ferocious Seattle punk band fronted by the late Mia Zapata. Their entire discography – Frenching the Bully (1992), Enter: The Conquering Chicken (1994), Kings & Queens (1996), and Seafish Louisville (2000) – features newly designed album cover art by Sub Pop’s VP of Creative Jeff Kleinsmith, and have all been remastered by legendary producer Jack Endino. They are available to hear NOW on all DSPs from Sub Pop. 

On January 31, 2025, a physical reissue of Frenching the Bully will also be released, and is available to preorder now from Sub Pop Mega Mart in North America, MegaMart2 in the EU/UK, and independent retailers worldwide. 

Revisit Evelyn McDonnell’s interview with The Gits’ band members Andy Kessler and Matt Dresdner in The New York Times (see November 12th story “A New Set of Gits Releases Gives Mia Zapata Her Voice Back”). 

You can also read Tim Sommer’s extensive liner notes on The Gits reissues here. 

Damon McMahon releases new remix album, Death Jokes II, today, the final work of the acclaimed Amen Dunes project. 

This is the last chapter of the final volume. Goodbye, I’ve barely said a word to you, but it’s always like that at parties - we never really see each other, we never say the things we should like to; in fact it’s the same everywhere in this life. Let’s hope that when we are dead things will be better arranged.

Amen Dunes was founded in 2006 with D.I.A., an album he recorded on an 8-track recorder in a trailer in Upstate New York. It grew from there, with McMahon releasing 6 full-length albums and 2 EPs over the last 18 years. Today he releases the 7th and final album, Death Jokes II, a reworked version of his May 2024 Sub Pop debut, Death Jokes. Hailed as “a daring turn in a different direction” by NPR Music, “a testament to McMahon’s sheer artistic brilliance” by Stereogum, and “a body of musical work that’s often as confounding as it is brilliant” by GQ, Death Jokes marked a major departure from Amen Dunes’ previous output, an ambitious album that saw McMahon immerse himself in the electronic music he grew up with but never imagined himself able to make.

Death Jokes was a complex project that took close to four years to complete and was recorded in various iterations, including an alternate version of the album recorded in June of 2021 at the famed East West Studios in Los Angeles (in the “Pet Sounds” and the haunted “Whitney Houston” rooms)  with Money Mark (Beastie Boys) on keyboards, and both Jim Keltner (Bob Dylan et. al) and Carla Azar (Autolux) on drums.

In reimagining the album as Death Jokes II, McMahon revisited all that material for stripped down remixes of the songs by Craig Silvey. These new mixes also include unheard contributions from notable Death Jokes contributors Panoram, Kwake Bass (Dean Blunt, MF DOOM), Christoffer Berg (Fever Ray), and Robbie Lee, a multi-instrumentalist and NYC veteran.

Death Jokes II is a celebration of endings and of deaths, marking the end of Amen Dunes, itself. 

Stream Death Jokes II

Death Jokes II Tracklist

1. Ian (Sunriser)

2. What I Want (Night Driver)

3. Exodus (Do It)

4. Rugby Child (300 Miles Per Hour)

5. Purple Land (In The Springs)

6. Mary Anne (Senigallia)

7. Italy Pop Punk

8. I Don’t Mind (Q Loop)

9. Round the World (Down South)

10. Ian (Goodbye)