On this episode I speak with the American musician and multidisciplinary artist Roberto Carlos Lange, who makes music under the moniker Helado Negro. I first heard Helado Negro on the S-Town podcast, and then really fell in love with his record This Is How You Smile in 2019. Since then there have been two new records: 2021s Far In, which was one of my favourites of that year, and now the excellent Phasor, which came out on February 9th via 4AD.

I speak with the vocalist, songwriter and artist magician Rian Bobbitt-Chertock, who makes music under the name Maria BC. This was a particularly exciting conversation for me because I was not expecting to have the intensity of response to this new record as I did. It’s called Spike Field, and it comes out on 20th October via Sacred Bones. Along with probably one other record, it is tied for my album of the year so far. I love how surprising and unusual and emotionally evocative it is. I love the concept and the depth to which it explores its themes. These are all things I had a chance to discuss with Rian, who was very generous throughout the interview. Spike Field's Bandcamp description: In the early 1990s, a team of linguists, engineers, anthropologists, and archaeologists were tasked with constructing a type of communication that could transcend time. How might we converse with future civilizations when language may evolve or dissolve entirely? The result yielded the design of spike fields; a strange construction of granite thorns bursting from the earth to alert its viewers to the deadly uninhabitability of nuclear waste disposal sites. For Maria BC (they/them), this state of temporal focus molds the wanderings on their second full length album Spike Field. How do we connect with the weathered shadow of our experience, while envisioning the self a few steps ahead of us? While their debut album Hyaline (2022, Father/Daughter) explored grief and anxiety through a series of character-led accounts, Spike Field recognizes that the past will continue to lurk below the surface until we decide to break through the soil. Spike Field was recorded in the home of a family friend. The home featured an out-of-tune baby Steinway piano, complete with squeaky hammers and strange, sporadic sounds. The piano is sprinkled throughout the album, and features extensively on opener “Amber,” showcasing Maria BC’s looser, more extensive arrangements. The song flickers with electronic wonder, like a wave seeking out its station, before crashing into the angelic choral introduction of “Watcher”. Strings, plucked guitar and buzzing swells accompany their classically-trained mezzosoprano voice on “Return to Sender,” a song that focuses on the frustrations and turmoil of being unable to reach a loved one––both physically and emotionally. Spike Field reminds us that despite our best efforts to bury certain aspects of ourselves, they will always lurk beneath the surface. Instead of ignoring the seeds striving to break through, we can point to these places with a curious grace, concocting a language that transcends words to converse with our previous selves. Maria BC pieces together juxtaposing sonic landscapes and oscillating vocals to represent the thread of miscommunication, or the failure of words, that weaves throughout the album, transforming it into a distinct and ever-evolving sonic tongue. If we listen, we might find something new within ourselves. 

On today’s episode I have a conversation with Al Menne. Al came up in the music scene as the lead singer of Seattle-based rock band Great Grandpa, who’s 2019 album Four of Arrows was one of my favourites that year. Al has an amazing warbly voice that can switch between registers in this seamless way which makes them one of my favourite working vocalists. They’ve just released their debut solo album Freak Accident which came out on 22nd September on Double Double Whammy, and it’s absolutely stunning. I love every song on the record and it will definitely be in and around the top of my list of favourite albums of the year. In our conversation we talk about their songwriting process, anger, and their short run as a stand up comedian among other things.

On this episode I have a conversation with Romy Madley Croft, also known just as Romy, about her first solo record Mid Air. Romy is perhaps best known as a guitarist and vocalist in the band The XX, but despite this being her official solo debut, she has been around as a solo artist for quite a while. Mid Air hearkens back to her queer nightlife days in the 1990s and 2000s when she was listening to a lot of emotional dance pop music in clubs. I love this album because it’s one you can easily dance around to with 5 people or 5000 people, and at the same time it's an album you can lie back and close your eyes and get lost in. She collaborated with Fred Again... and Stuart Price to create this world - and it really is a world you step into as the listener. It was very cool for me to get to talk to Romy because The XX’s debut album came out right when I was in my first year of uni, and it occupies a very particular place in my musical canon.

I speak with Neil Halstead from the band Slowdive. Slowdive are a legendary British shoegaze band that formed in Reading in 1989. They, along with My Bloody Valentine, are credited with pioneering the shoegaze sound: ethereal obscured vocals, swirling guitar distortion and effects, feedback, and overwhelming volume. The band's 1993 album Souvlaki has been recognized as one of the best releases of the 1990s and one of the greatest shoegaze albums of all time. The band broke up soon after the release of their third studio album Pygmalion in 1995, and reunited in 2014 to play Primavera Sound festival. In 2017 they released their first album in 22 years, Slowdive, which is perhaps the best music they’ve ever done. Their fifth and latest album, Everything Is Alive, came out on 1st September via Dead Oceans, and it is also excellent. It was a true honour to get to talk with Neil, who is Slowdive’s primary songwriter. We got to talk about everything from his studio setup to the band’s early days, to his love of surfing. Support Slowdive by buying Everything is Alive here.

Buck Meek is an American musician from Wimberley, Texas, best known as the guitarist and backing vocalist of Big Thief. His third solo album, Haunted Mountain, comes out on August 25th via 4AD. In our conversation we talk about the relationship between emotions and environment, his songwriting process, and surfing with luminescent dolphins.

Today's guests are Kelcey Ayer and Taylor Rice from the band Local Natives, an American indie rock band based in Silver Lake, Los Angeles. They just released their fifth album, Time Will Wait for No One, on July 7th via Loma Vista and Concord. They worked on the album while they were enduring a "time of metamorphosis" as individuals, citing in a press release a concert in Los Angeles which they described as "one of the most emotional concerts" of their career that made them uncertain of their future as a band and as individuals. In our conversation we discuss being new parents, trying to write new music while separated from your band, the new sport pickleball, a tour bus fire, and more.

Today's episode features my conversation with Meg Remy of the Toronto-based experimental pop project U.S. Girls. U.S. Girls was formed in 2007, and she released music on a variety of independent record labels before signing to 4AD in 2015. Half Free, her first record for 4AD, garnered a Juno Award nomination for Alternative Album of the Year at the Juno Awards of 2016, and was a shortlisted finalist for the 2016 Polaris Music Prize. Her next records In a Poem Unlimited (2018) and Heavy Light (2020) also received the same accolades. Meg collaborates with a number of Toronto-based musicians on both songwriting and music production. In our conversation we discuss her eighth record Bless This Mess, which came out on February 24th. We talk about the creation of music while pregnant, as well as the documentation of the transformative effects of motherhood on her physical body, her personal connections, and worldview.

On today's episode I talk with Karly Hartzman of the band Wednesday. The band is based in Asheville, North Carolina, and is currently signed to Dead Oceans. As well as Karly, the band consists of guitarist Jake Lenderman, lap steel player Xandy Chelmis, and drummer Alan Miller. A Wednesday song is a quilt. A short story collection, a half-memory, a patchwork of portraits of the American south, disparate moments that somehow make sense as a whole. Karly is a story collector as much as she is a storyteller: a scholar of people and one-liners. Rat Saw God, the Asheville quintet’s new and best record, is ekphrastic but autobiographical and above all, deeply empathetic. Half-funny, half-tragic dispatches from North Carolina unfurling somewhere between the wailing skuzz of Nineties shoegaze and classic country twang, that distorted lap steel and Hartzman’s voice slicing through the din. Rat Saw God is an album about riding a bike down a suburban stretch in Greensboro while listening to My Bloody Valentine for the first time on an iPod Nano, past a creek that runs through the neighborhood riddled with broken glass bottles and condoms, a front yard filled with broken and rusted car parts, a lonely and dilapidated house reclaimed by kudzu. Four Lokos and rodeo clowns and a kid who burns down a corn field. Roadside monuments, church marquees, poppers and vodka in a plastic water bottle, the shit you get away with at Jewish summer camp, strange sentimental family heirlooms at the thrift stores. The way the South hums alive all night in the summers and into fall, the sound of high school football games, the halo effect from the lights polluting the darkness. It’s not really bright enough to see in front of you, but in that stretch of inky void – somehow – you see everything. Karly and I discuss her songwriting process, learning to play music as an adult, her love of indie video games, and a bunch of other stuff, in our conversation.

Today's guest, Indigo De Souza, is an American singer-songwriter from Asheville, North Carolina. She has been noted for creating intimate, anxious indie rock songs that wrangle with disappointment and relationship challenges, with personal and confessional lyrics. We discuss the influence of the 2020/21 lockdown on her personal life and songwriting process, her love of the band Friendship, her run of shows at SXSW 2023, and some other stuff, in our conversation. Her forthcoming album, All of This Will End, comes out on April 28th via Saddle Creek. Purchase it here if you'd like Indigo to get some money for it. Produced, Edited, Hosted by Sam Walsh Music by Greig Dickson Logo by Rachel Levy