Sub Pop has signed musician Lael Neale [pron. l-ai-l n-EE-l] to release her songs into the world in 2021. In celebration of the announcement, we are pleased to share the video for her first single “Every Star Shivers in the Dark,” which features Lael’s crystalline voice poised above a drum machine and hypnotic church organ, with production by Guy Blakeslee and mastering by Chris Coady.
Lael says of the song: “This is my ode to Los Angeles, which always felt to me like the outskirts of Eden. I would walk a lot in the city, go from Dodgers Stadium into Downtown - along Alameda. Up in the hills, I’d look out at the vast sprawl and feel daunted. But Los Angeles is not as it appears. Even in moments of isolation, I have looked for communion with strangers and, almost always, found it. These were the scenes and feelings swirling around when I was challenging myself to write a song using only two chords.”
“In directing the video, I was aiming to reflect both the light and the shade I experienced in the city at the time I was writing the song. It was a nod to some of my favorite 60s films that marry the bright with the heavy, dark humor with dispassion.”
Lael grew up on a farm in Virginia among acres of clouds, fields, and woods. It was writing and writers close to nature - Ralph Waldo Emerson, John Steinbeck, and Mary Oliver - that she most connected with. In 2009, she moved to California with a rising devotion to music.
She continues, “As songs began to emerge, I spent years honing my writing, enjoying the solitude and the internal process. Performing frightened me, but I took it as an opportunity to face fear and put an end to its rule over other areas of my life.”
In early 2019, in the midst of a major transition, Lael discovered the Omnichord and in the span of 3 months wrote a torrent of songs, including “Every Star Shivers in the Dark.” She offers this: “In a liminal space between ending and beginning, I started recording these songs. Guy, who had been an advocate for years facilitated the process. He set up the 4-track in my bedroom and provided empathic guidance, subtle but deep accompaniment, and engineering prowess. Normally I’m a morning person, however, I made most of the recordings in the early darkening evening.”
Lael Neale ”Every Star Shivers in the Dark” Single Artwork (Photo credit: Jessa Hill)
Full details for worldwide album launch live stream announced - Covers will be out November 13th.
Listen to “Between The Bars” and “All Night” here now.
Marika Hackman recently surprised fans with details of a new album, Covers, and shared her interpretation of the beloved Grimes track “Realiti”. Covers is a darkly beautiful, self-produced album which showcases a more vulnerable side, out November 13th via Sub Pop in the Americas and Transgressive for the rest of the world.
Today, Hackman unveils two more tracks from the album. First up is her gorgeous cover of Elliott Smith’s beloved “Between the Bars.” “I’ve been playing ‘Between the Bars’ live for a while now, on the last few tours and in live streams. It’s been nice to play around with the arrangement, and I hope people enjoy what I’ve done with this recorded version,” offered Hackman about the track. In classic Marika style the opposing track couldn’t be more different - “All Night” sees her tackling one of the standouts from Beyonce’s Grammy-nominated Lemonade. Again, Hackman flips the song on its head. Joined by a choir of stacked vocal harmonies, Marika’s voice transcends to conjure a deep emotional resonance.
During the extended stay-at-home orders of the last few months, Marika felt that creating a covers record was a way of exploring new sound ideas and expressing herself without having the pressure of a blank page. She recorded and produced Covers between home and her parents’ house, then got David Wrench to mix it. In contrast to her last two albums (2019’s Any Human Friend & 2017’s I’m Not Your Man), this collection of songs is more akin in tone and feel to her debut We Slept At Last, with a darker and more introspective sound. On Covers, we hear Marika’s emotive voice set against sparse arrangements of guitars and strings with the occasional synth or scattered drum groove.
Breathing new life into the songs she’s chosen, Marika reimagines work by some of the world’s most beloved artists, such as Radiohead, Air, Sharon Van Etten and more. It’s a suitably varied collection, but Marika’s intimate delivery and soft, nuanced and atmospheric touch to production, thread them all together effortlessly.
Marika explains how she came to choose the material: “When it comes to covers, I like to pick songs which I have been listening to obsessively for a while. It gives me a natural understanding of the music, and lets me be more innovative with how I transform it.”
Adventurous and versatile, Covers continues Marika’s lineage in turning each body of work into a new take and perspective on her creative vision. She twists and turns, always surprises, and is never afraid to wear her heart on her sleeve. It remains anyone’s guess to imagine where she will head next.
Marika also has shared further details of her live stream taking place in an abandoned swimming pool that will take place on Covers release day. Tickets for the show will be available when fans pre-order the album. It occurs on November 13th at 8:30 pm GMT and 9 pm EST/6 pm PT.
The Downtown Boys have contributed their arrangement of communist anthem “L’Internationale” to the Italian film Miss Marx. Directed by Susanna Nicchiarelli, Miss Marx is a biopic about Karl Marx’s daughter, who was an important but often overlooked organizer and writer. She led many women to take up their/our rightful power in socialism. The band recorded this version of “L’Internationale,” as an ode to the global struggle and passion for a freedom bigger than themselves.
Miss Marx recently premiered at the Venice International Film Festival, where Downtown Boys and Gatto Ciliegia contro il Grande Freddo won the Soundtrack Stars Award for their work on the film.
About the song and film, Downtown Boys said:
“This year, we saw people throughout the globe come together amidst the pain of and struggle against police brutality, and the loss of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd. We have lost over 200k people in our country from a global pandemic exacerbated by greed. And, throughout this all, we have seen people collectively fight back. We hope this video is a reminder of the vessel that brings us together to scream, shout, cry, or rest. Miss Marx would rally women socialists against patriarchy and global capital, and this video shows outtakes of Miss Marx and her comrades singing. The upcoming election and these continuing moments of collective power need to be vessels for our voices. In the spirit of Eleanor Marx and the current moment, please please go anywhere you can to sign up to vote or support others in voting, both by the ballot box in a few weeks and by all the ways we see people picking the side of freedom.”
Go here to register to vote, find out how/where/when to vote, and to support free and fair elections in the US this November.
On October 23rd, Clipping will release their new album Visions of Bodies Being Burned, the follow up to their 2019 horrorcore-inspired album There Existed an Addiction to Blood. Each track on the group’s new album pairs a different expression of horror with one of Clipping’s signature metamorphic takes on a hip-hop subgenre.
Featuring Michael Esposito, “Pain Everyday” uses real EVP (Electronic Voice Phenomena) recordings—said to be the voices of restless spirits—atop a cinematic breakcore collage, as a call-to-arms for the ghosts of lynching victims to haunt the white descendants of their murderers.
About the song, lyricist Daveed Diggs says, “This song was one of the most challenging to write because it’s the first time we’ve done a track entirely in ⅞, which, it turns out, is kind of a mind fuck. I love how it came out because it’s in this odd time signature but the flow still feels natural, like rap is supposed to.” You can watch the group’s new lyric video for “Pain Everyday” right here, which was directed by Clipping’s own Jonathan Snipes and longtime collaborator Cristina Bercovitz.
Visions of Bodies Being Burned is available to preorder through Sub Pop Mega Mart. Preorders of the LP through megamart.subpop.com and select independent retailers in North America will receive the limited, Loser edition on mixed red/orange/yellow colored vinyl (while supplies last). Meanwhile, LP preorders of Visions of Bodies Being Burned throughout the UK and Europe from select independent retailers will receive the limited Loser edition on gold vinyl (while supplies last).
Sub Pop has just released new singles by Julia Jacklin, Le Ren, and Ohmme as part of the Sub Pop Singles Club Vol. 5. The three singles are available to Singles Club subscribers as limited-edition 7” singles (subscriptions are nearly sold-out!), and are available now at all digital music services.
[Cover Art photography by @nick_mckk] Julia Jacklin: [Listen Here] On “to Perth, before the border closes,” Australian singer/songwriter Julia Jacklin copes with an extended period of transience. In her words: “I’ve moved around a lot the last 5 years; chasing things, love, work, something new, whatever and there’s always this fear that I’m leaving good things behind just to go somewhere else and be lonely. Whispering “everything changes” to myself helps get me to sleep at night.” B-side “Cry” is a Dolly Parton-inspired stream-of-consciousness, featuring Perth musicians Jennifer Aslett, Chris Wright, and Jacob Diamond; it was recorded by her old friend and housemate Ryan Brennan, who nine years ago was the first person to record her music. You can watch the video for “to Perth, before the border closes” which was directed by Julia Jacklin here.
[Cover Art photography by @coteypope] Le Ren: [Listen Here] Represented by the prestigious record label Secretly Canadian, Le Ren (moniker of Montreal-based artist Lauren Spear) was introduced to US audiences last year when she opened for Orville Peck on his national tour. This summer she released her debut EP Morning & Melancholia. Lauren has studied folk and bluegrass going back to her early teens, partaking in workshops all over North America. Growing up on Nexwlélexm/Bowen Island, she was raised on the holy trinity of John Prine, Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan. Their curious, deadpan and cosmic approach to life’s most brutal swipes feed Le Ren’s sensibilities, and her own lyrical couplets are as simply put as they are devastating.
[Cover Art by @lord_birthday] Ohmme: [Listen Here] There’s obvious chemistry emanating throughout Ohmme’s music that’s so tangible it can only come from a decades-spanning friendship. Songwriters Sima Cunningham and Macie Stewart formed their unbreakable bond performing throughout the fringes of Chicago’s many interlocking communities, collaborating with titans from the city’s indie rock, hip-hop, and improvised worlds. The two formed Ohmme in 2014 as an outlet to explore an unconventional approach to their instruments. “That’s the whole genesis of the band: us walking up to our guitars and saying, ‘how can we make this noisemaker do something different?’” says Cunningham. Their 2016 self-titled debut EP took these experiments live and showcased the band’s vocal interplay that is another key to their songs. The full-length follow up, Parts, found the duo adding a drummer, Matt Carroll, and expanding their sound; Spin wrote: “Ohmme’s aesthetic universe has the cramped intimacy of a small rehearsal space, and they are its masters. Anything they can squeeze inside—swirling baroque vocal melodies, punchy punk power chords, three-minute rockers and dreamlike chamber-pop suites—ends up sounding like Ohmme.” Their latest album, Fantasize Your Ghost, was released in June of 2020 and found the band featured in outlets such as Premier Guitar and Uncut with songs that capture more closely the band’s live show
