In this time of Coronavirus, virtual learning/remote everything, and with the world seemingly forever in flux, we truly welcome the uplift and reprieve provided by our impressive and inspirational winners of the 2021 Sub Pop Loser Scholarship! The Losers who won this year are an extraordinary bunch. Our Loser Chooser (TM) scholarship committee spent hours reading through hundreds of applications, and at the end of a very difficult decision-making process, we’ve come up with three ultramega-OK, life-affirming scholarship winners. Congratulations and heartfelt thanks to all who took the time to apply, you have brightened up some weird days.

First up is Ashadé, a wonderful performer at Nova High School. We were completely blown away by Ashadé’s mental toughness and ability to create truly beautiful poetry, creative writing and performance art in spite of difficult circumstances. The writing samples that Ashadé provided were truly breathtaking and her original songs were too good to be true. We couldn’t believe how much her cup of talent overfloweth! Ashadé is a truly wonderful Loser who we are happy to crown a winner.

Next up: Jonah, from the great state of Oregon! Jonah is a bright, shining star bringing joy, energy and social awareness to spaces that need a bit of fresh air. Through his stunning visual artwork Jonah is working to bring awareness and energy to uplift trans youth and immigrant artists. The thoughtful application Jonah submitted really reflected what it means to be a Loser, and that is to stand up and be who you want to be in spite of all expectations and perceived limitations. Jonah is breaking down walls and we couldn’t be happier to support him. What. A. Loser!

Finally, we were completely won over by Taylor from Issaquah. As a teenager, Taylor has found more ways to support artists in need than most adults. Through her non-profit arts program Student Art Spaces, Taylor has helped remove financial barriers for emerging artists and given them a platform to be seen. Through lived experience as an artist Taylor saw how BIPOC and LGBTQ+ people were excluded from galleries. With a fistful of fliers and an audacious idea, Taylor managed to change the narrative to help support emerging and underrepresented artists from around the world. (Jeez, that sounds familiar…) We are thrilled to call Taylor a Loser winner.

Clipping has delivered an incredible at-home performance for NPR Music’s “Tiny Desk Meets SXSW” concert. The remote performance features, quite possibly, the tiniest desks to ever appear in the series, and includes highlights from the band’s acclaimed albums Visions of Bodies Being Burned (2020) and There Existed an Addiction to Blood (2019), along with their Wriggle EP (2016) and debut mixtape midcity (2013).
 
NPR Music says, “Leave it to Clipping to innovate around the central notion of the Tiny Desk; to take the series’ emphasis on close-up intimacy and transport it to new heights of, well, tininess. This is, after all, a band that contains multitudes. Producers William Hutson and Jonathan Snipes craft a bed of hip-hop, industrial music and noisy experimentalism, then set loose rapper Daveed Diggs, whose violent imagery summons ’90s horrorcore and a thousand bloody movies. The band’s last two album titles — There Existed an Addiction to Blood and Visions of Bodies Being Burned — offer up a sense of the vibe, but Diggs’ gift for rapid-fire wordplay also acts as a leavening agent (see NPR Music April 18th).”
 
The “Tiny Desk” concert was recorded, edited, and mixed by Clipping. It was directed and edited by Cristina Bercovitz, who also fabricated the tiny furniture for the performance. The footage was filmed by Bercovitz, Erin Bates, and Daveed Diggs, and also features additional drums by Chukwudi Hodge.
 
New York Times says of the performance, “The avant-hip-hop group led by the “Hamilton” star Daveed Diggs appeared in a showcase selected by NPR’s Tiny Desk Concerts, and took “tiny” as a video mandate. As Diggs rapped into a thumbnail-size microphone, his collaborators, Jonathan Snipes and William Hutson, pretended (on split screens) to play miniature versions of (among other things) a laptop, guitar pedals and a windup music box, as the music warped itself from pink noise to music-box tinkle to industrial distortion to techno beats. No simulation was involved in the tour de force that was Diggs’s breakneck, virtually nonstop rapping, with rhymes that raced from free-associative wordplay to nightmare imagery to a grimly prescient 2019 song, ‘Nothing Is Safe.’ (see March 22nd Critics Notebook)”
 
Clipping’s Visions of Bodies Being Burned, There Existed an Addiction to Blood and Wriggle, are available now worldwide from Sub Pop. The self-released midcity is also available at all DSPs.
 
What people are saying about Clipping’s Visions of Bodies Being Burned:
“If Run the Jewels are the polemicist poets facing America’s racial reckoning with six-foot-high spray-painted lettering, Clipping’s members are the academics connecting the horrors of the country’s past with thumbtacks and string…There Existed an Addiction to Blood” from 2019 and Visions of Bodies Being Burned — sew the group’s socially conscious threads through the gory narratives of ’90s “horrorcore” rap artists like Brotha Lynch Hung and Ganksta N-I-P.” - New York Times
 
“In the group’s ambitious new horror-themed album, Visions of Bodies Being Burned’ each song plays into one of the genre’s tropes, occasionally as an expression of radical politics. Nowhere is this overlap more effective than on “Pain Everyday,” which calls on the ghosts of lynching victims to haunt the descendants of their killers.” - The New Yorker
 
“Clipping’s finest refinement yet of their abrasive horror-rap.” ★★★★- MOJO
 
“Like a mind-melting experimental audiobook, fitting as comfortably in the club as it does in the headphones.” - The Wire
 
“Throughout, Clipping stun and shock with their most complete work to date, and Visions of Bodies Being Burned proves the group to be as dynamic as they are devastating (9/10).” - Loud & Quiet
 
“This is a once-in-a-generation band reaching their peak.” ★★★★ - DIY

“Few listening experiences this year are as gripping, visceral, and vivid as Visions of Bodies Being Burned (8.5./10).”- Under the Radar
 
“Visions of Bodies Being Burned is an album that will cement clipping.’s reputation as one of the most exciting and visionary groups working in music today (8/10).” - CLASH
 
“Not many acts find the midway point between Wolf Eyes and Three 6 Mafia, but by the time Visions reaches its apex at the brutal centerpiece “Looking Like Meat,” that’s exactly what clipping. sounds like. It’s a particularly threatening chapter of horrorcore that renders even some of the more severe acts that came before almost cartoonish by comparison.” ★★★★ - All Music
 
“Visions of Bodies Being Burned demands you wake up to the full horror – of clipping.’s fictional world, and the real world behind it.” ★★★★ - The Forty Five

“Visions of Bodies Being Burned reveals the records to be a kind of Frankenstein’s monster — assembled from many unlike parts and reanimated through three mad scientists’ passion. The result is a long anthology of love letters to the genre: raps to match a modern Poe, beats to leave the blood curdled, and a pair of back-to-back albums bisected, but with a still-beating heart.” - SF Weekly
 
“Clipping. delivers a series of captivating songs that are equally unsettling (8/10).” - RIFF Magazine
 
“In this diptych, I love both parts of the equation equally (get it?). I’ll pick up There Existed an Addiction To Blood if I want to feel mad and emboldened in my anger, set against the injustice of the world and our tiny piece of it. But it’s Visions that I’ll pick up if I want to feel that ghostly chill or just that indescribable feeling you get when faced with real fear, with the uncanny. Guttural fear. Visceral fear of the strange world you thought was familiar to you but turns out: you were wrong.” - Heavy Blog is Heavy
 
“Clipping. are the best, always outdoing themselves at every pass and that’s all you need to do to succeed in this life. Bra-fucking-vo.” - Everything is Noise

Clipping
Visions of Bodies Being Burned
 
Tracklisting:
1. Intro
2. Say the Name
3. Wytchboard (Interlude)*
4. ‘96 Neve Campbell (feat. Cam & China)
5. Something Underneath
6. Make Them Dead
7. She Bad
8. Invocation (Interlude) (with Greg Stuart)*
9. Pain Everyday (with Michael Esposito)
10. Check the Lock
11. Looking Like Meat (feat. Ho99o9)
12. Drove (Interlude)*
13. Eaten Alive (with Jeff Parker & Ted Byrnes)
14. Body for the Pile (with Sickness)
15. Enlacing
16. Secret Piece
*CD/digital/cassette-only tracks

On April 30th, 2021, Sub Pop will release Indian Yard, the debut record from Sitka, Alaska project Ya Tseen. Indian Yard is an intense illumination of feeling and interconnectedness. Following the group’s debut offerings, “Close the Distance”, and “Knives” (feat. John Baldwin Gourley of Portugal. The Man), comes their latest single “Synthetic Gods.” Hinging on verses from Shabazz Palaces and Stas THEE Boss, “Synthetic Gods” is sonically seductive, a tense reflection on crisis that summons the pressure needed to ensure Indigenous sovereignty and power to the people.

Photo Credit: Desert X 2021 installation view of Nicholas Galanin, Never Forget, photo by Lance Geber, courtesy of Desert X.  https://www.gofundme.com/f/landback.

Ya Tseen’s Nicholas Galanin is one of the most vital voices in contemporary art. His work spans sculpture, video, installation, photography, jewelry, and music; advocating for Indigenous sovereignty, racial, social, and environmental justice, for present, and future generations. For Galanin, memory and land are inevitably entwined. His most recent installation for Desert X 2021, on view through May 16, 2021, entitled Never Forget has garnered international media acclaim including from outlets such as The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Desert Sun, Galerie Magazine, and Time Out. The 45-foot letters of Never Forget reference the Hollywood sign, which initially spelled out HOLLYWOODLAND and was erected to promote a whites-only development. Its timing coincided with a development in Palm Springs that also connected to the film industry: Studio contracts limited actors’ travel, contributing to the city’s rise as a playground and refuge of the stars. Meanwhile, the white settler mythology of America as the land of the free, home of the brave was promoted in the West, and the landscape was cinematized through the same lens. Never Forget asks settler landowners to participate in the work by transferring land titles and management to local Indigenous communities. The work is a call to action and a reminder that land acknowledgments become only performative when they do not explicitly support the land back movement. Not only does the work transmit a shockwave of historical correction, but also promises to do so globally through social media. In connection with this installation, Galanin has organized a Go Fund Me account to benefit the Native American Land Conservancy (NALC.) You can contribute here. 
 
Indian Yard is now available for preorder on CD/LP through Sub Pop. Preorders through megamart.subpop.com, select independent retailers in North America, the U.K., and Europe will receive the standard LP on black vinyl.

The North American deluxe edition on clear vinyl is now available for preorder. The deluxe packaging will include a 24-page hardcover LP-sized book with covers featuring a sci-fi landscape populated by a toddler-wearing artist Merritt Johnson’s sculpture Mindset, a VR headset woven from sweetgrass. The interior art was designed by Galanin. This deluxe edition will be available while supplies last.

Ya Tseen
Indian Yard

Tracklisting:
1. Knives (feat. Portugal. The Man)
2. Light the Torch
3. Born into Rain (feat. rum.gold and tunia)
4. At Tugáni
5. Get Yourself Together
6. Close the Distance
7. We Just Sit and Smile Here in Silence
8. A Feeling Undefined (feat. Nick Hakim and Iska Dhaaf)
9. Synthetic Gods (feat. Shabazz Palaces and Stas THEE Boss)
10. Gently to the Sun (feat. Tay Sean)
11. Back in That Time (feat. Qacung)

On May 7th, 2021, Sub Pop will release Tallahassee; Archive Series Volume no. 5, the lost-in-time debut album from Iron & Wine. A collection of songs recorded over a two-year (1998-99) window during which Iron & Wine’s Sam Beam attended Florida State University’s College of Motion Picture Arts. Three years later, Iron & Wine would issue The Creek Drank the Cradle and begin a run of records widely praised as being part of a new blueprint in the singer-songwriter genre. 
 
Tallahassee doesn’t attempt to re-write history but instead aims to document the very first steps in Beam’s journey to becoming one of America’s most original and distinctive artists.  

The eleven-song collection was culled from a number of recordings that had been (mostly) forgotten by Beam himself but had been preserved by former roommate and one-time Iron & Wine member, EJ Holowicki. Holowicki, whom went on to work as a sound designer at Skywalker Sound, was a catalyst in making sure Beam documented these songs while the two were roommates in a house on St. Augustine St. near campus. In addition to serving as both engineer and bassist, Holowicki also worked as an archival producer in preparing the tracks for official release. 
 
Tallahassee, with its sparse instrumental canvas and live-in one-room takes, is very much akin to early Iron & Wine releases, The Creek Drank the Cradle, The Sea & The Rhythm, and In the Reins. From the wandering country-esque tempo of “Calm on the Valley” to the more mid-tempo Harvest-era vibe of “This Solemn Day”, the seeds of the portrait of an artist as a young man are all present. While still in its formative stages, the lyrical imagery and intimate musical nature that has become a trademark of the Iron & Wine “sound” is present and represented throughout Tallahassee.  
 
Early music file-sharers have long claimed ownership of a number of early Iron & Wine recordings, many that still have yet to be officially released. While this record will not quite correct all the wrongs of the early days of the internet, it will fill in many of the blanks for long-time fans.  

Tallahassee is part of the official Iron and Wine Archive Series. It will be released on LP/CD/CS/DSPs and is now available for preorder from Sub Pop. LP preorders from megamart.subpop.com, Iron & Wine’s official website, select independent retailers in North America, the U.K. and EU will receive the limited Loser edition on yellow-splattered vinyl (while supplies last). 

Iron & Wine
Archive Series Volume No.5: Tallahassee
 
Tracklisting:
1. Why Hate the Winter
2. This Solemn Day
3. Loaning Me Secrets
4. John’s Glass Eye
5. Calm on the Valley
6. Ex-Lover Lucy Jones
7. Elizabeth
8. Show Him the Ground
9. Straight and Tall
10. Cold Town
11. Valentine

Beginning on July 31st in Columbus, OH, Bully will embark on a 10 date North American run with shows in, Nashville, Atlanta, St. Louis, Chicago, and Seattle, ending on September 11th at the Bootleg Theater in Los Angeles. These dates are in support of the band’s critically acclaimed 2020 release, SUGAREGG. 

To celebrate their impending tour dates, you can now watch a full-band performance of the lead single “Where to Start” filmed at Drkmttr in Nashville, TN. SUGAREGG was one of the best-reviewed albums of 2020, receiving accolades from the likes of The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Guardian, Pitchfork, Rolling Stone, CLASH, DIY, Alternative Press, Nashville Scene, Spin, Stereogum (“Album of the Week”), and Bandcamp (“Album of the Day”).

At radio, SUGAREGG peaked at #1 on the NACC 200 college radio for three weeks. The album also reached #1 on the SubModern commercial specialty chart. Support at radio is coming from many big stations including Sirius’s “ALT NATION” and “XMU,” Music Choice, The Current and GO 96.3 in Minneapolis, KEXP in Seattle, Radio Milwaukee, and many more!
 
Bully’s Alicia Bognanno also recorded sessions with KEXP, The Current, and Lightning 100 in Nashville. 
 
SUGAREGG was produced and mixed by John Congleton and Bully’s Alicia Bognanno, with additional production and mixing by Graham Walsh, recorded at Pachyderm Studios in Cannon Falls, Minnesota, and Palace Sound in Toronto, Ontario, and mastered by Heba Kadry. 

SUGAREGG is available worldwide from Sub Pop.
 
Tour Dates:
Jul. 31 - Columbus, OH - Skully’s Music Diner
Aug. 14 - Nashville, TN - Mercy Lounge
Aug. 20 - Birmingham, AL - Saturn
Aug. 21 - Atlanta, GA - The EARL    
Aug. 26 - St Louis, MO - Off Broadway
Aug. 28 - Chicago, IL - Empty Bottle
Aug. 30 - Milwaukee, WI - Back Room at Colectivo
Aug. 31 - Minneapolis, MN - Fine Line Music Hall
Sep. 04 - Seattle, WA - Neumos
Sep. 11 - Los Angeles, CA - Bootleg Theatre

Grab your tickets here.
 
What people are saying about SUGAREGG:
“Bognanno may be continuing a great tradition, but it provides a framework for catharsis that is deeply personal and candour that feels truly progressive.” ★★★★ - The Guardian
 
“SUGAREGG is confident and assured.” ★★★★ - NME
 
“The record flows, hitting knee-skinning highs like “Stuck in Your Head” (“I just wanted to pick up the tempo!” Bognanno sing-songs as the band counts off), barn-burners like “You” (about, it seems, an absent parent) and the hauntingly discordant “Hours and Hours.” Whatever the subject matter, whatever the tempo, each track finds Bognanno full-throated, wild and free…their most self-assured album yet.” ★★★½ - RollingStone
 
“SUGAREGG shows a musician at the top of their game, unafraid to take themselves a little less seriously than before.” ★★★★½  - The Forty Five
 
“When push comes to shove, SUGAREGG goes far to ease and maintain the cool in encountering happy sentiments and combine them with a fuck-it-all attitude. It is the blistering irresistibility of what is achieved at that point, which makes this record striking and inescapable.”[8/10] - CLASH
 
“This is joyous bubblegum grunge…Alicia Bognanno’s voice is as mesmeric and feral as ever, and her band sound simply, effortlessly, gigantic…you’re going to be rotting your teeth on SUGAREGG for weeks.” ★★★★ - NARC
 
“It’s a product full of joy, not maddening, but genuinely uplifting and encouraging. It’s also the best thing Bognanno has written. As the public is becoming increasingly accustomed to performances composed of lies and consistent sleight of hand, it’s rewarding to see someone go in the opposite direction and peel back the layers, revealing a freer and more transparent artistic self. It clearly hasn’t been easy, but on this basis, it certainly seems worth it.” - The Line Of Best Fit
 
“The most explosive collection of songs from Bognanno’s discography.” - Under the Radar
 
“…The songs on SUGAREGG feel like the singer, songwriter, guitarist, engineer and producer has reached a new level of comfort in her relationship with herself.” - Nashville Scene

Bully
SUGAREGG
 
Tracklisting:
1. Add It On
2. Every Tradition
3. Where to Start
4. Prism
5. You
6. Let You
7. Like Fire
8. Stuck in Your Head
9. Come Down
10. Not Ashamed
11. Hours and Hours
12. What I Wanted