The New Respects are a high-energy throwback rock and soul quartet comprising siblings Alexandria, Alexis, and Darius Fitzgerald and their cousin Jasmine Mullen. The children of a Nashville preacher, twins Alexandria (guitar) and Alexis (bass) and their brother Darius (drums) grew up on gospel music, and while Mullen (vocals) heard a wider range of influences in the house, her parents were both songwriters in the Christian music industry, with her mom, Nicole C. Mullen, having established herself as a prominent recording artist in the early 2000s. Forming in high school as the John Hancock Band, the quartet was initially based around more of an indie folk sound. As they became more established, the influences of early rock, R&B, blues, and soul began to inform their sound, and their music became more dynamic. By 2016, they’d signed with Capitol CMG and changed their name to the New Respects. Following a pair of singles later that year, they made their debut in early 2017 with the Here Comes Trouble EP.
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Will Toledo isn’t perfect. But he’s loud, honest, and painfully aware of his place in the world.
With his thick-rimmed glasses and sheepish demeanor, Will Toledo is much more Clark Kent than Superman. Sure, the 23-year-old songwriter behind Car Seat Headrest may be taller than most of the people he stands next to, but he has yet to find the particular swagger that’s so often apparent in rock stars of his stature.
Don’t blame the good folks at Matador Records, who have done everything they can to position Toledo as the heir apparent to Stephen Malkmus, Robert Pollard, and other titans of guitar-based indie rock. Last October, the label released Teens of Style, a collection of songs hand-selected from Toledo’s 11 Bandcamp albums and re-recorded as his proper solo debut. It was meant to register as a sonic boom on the rock-music landscape, but its frequent lightning flashes of brilliance only signified something bigger to come.
That something bigger has now arrived in the form of Teens of Denial, Car Seat Headrest’s second proper studio album and the first to feature an all-new collection of songs. “It’s sort of a unique situation,” Toledo explained when we caught up with him in Los Angeles, before a headlining show at the Natural History Museum of all places. While their names are similar, Style and Denial aren’t exactly sibling albums. Toledo describes Denial, out via Matador on May 20th, as the most ambitious thing he’s ever done, and early singles like the sprawling “Drunk Drivers/Killer Whales” might be the closest indie rock has come to perfection since Pavement bit the dust.
Rousing choruses, cut-to-the-heart lyricism, superfluous alter-egos — Teens of Denial pretty much nails every single ingredient that goes into a great rock record. And standing at the center of it all is the quiet, contemplative Toledo, who might just be the indie rock Superman we’ve been waiting for all these years. After chatting with the guy in person, here are five reasons why the glasses aren’t fooling us.
He Writes Angsty Rock Songs that Won’t Be Embarrassing 10 Years from Now
Toledo may be a few years removed from his teens, but he isn’t trying to hide the fact that teen angst still dominates his songwriting. “Drunk Drivers/Killer Whales” approaches that well-worn topic from a different perspective — or rather, several different perspectives at once. Toledo knew he wanted to write a song about that vague, listless, depressing feeling that settles in on the way home from the party, but he also wanted to reach beyond that, toward some kind of cosmic truth. He had just finished watching the documentary Blackfish and felt equally depressed about its depiction of captive killer whales, so he thought, “Why not conflate both forms of depression?”.
“Yeah, that was a thing where two separate, unrelated ideas came together,” he explains. “After the movie, I just had this idea for what became the bridge and the lyrics in the bridge. I think the killer whales is a perfect image that takes you away from the immediate action and draws out a contrast and comparison between the two ideas. And you know, you go from a car at night to a tank or an ocean.” The result is an odd kind of poetry, which looks silly on paper but really does find a new, mature way to approach the theme of teen angst.
It’s funny, Toledo observes, how the angsty music one listens to as a teen can be painful to revisit as an adult. He’s doing everything he can to fulfill the noble mission of writing honest, angst-ridden music that will actually stand the test of time. “I’m kind of impressed with my tastes as a kid,” he says. “As far as angsty music, I was into Nirvana, which still holds up, and Green Day, which I think in comparison to a lot of other pop-punk bands, they do hold up. American Idiot is still a pretty impressive concept album.
“But I think it’s totally a valid goal to aspire to: Having the sort of album where it can be something that maybe adults will smile a little bit about the kids listening to it, but the kids listening to it can grow up and look back on it and say, ‘That was a good album.’”
His Covers Hardly Sound Like Covers At All
One of the most delightful moments on Teens of Denial comes in a song called “There Is a Policeman in All Our Heads, He Must Be Destroyed”. The song starts off sounding like a straightforward cover of The Cars’ “Just What I Needed”, but Toledo superimposes his own vocal melody on the intro, and soon the “cover” becomes a new song entirely. It’s not until the song’s outro that he returns to the Cars song that inspired him, at which point it catches the listener off-guard. It’s a weird and delightful experience, and none other like it comes to mind.
Except for the fact that Toledo has been pulling off this trick for a while now. He brings up one of his earlier tracks, “The Gun Song”, which appears on his 2013 Bandcamp album Nervous Young Man. “My idea is that it would be a cover of Neil Young’s ‘Down by the River’, but that it would be extremely long and it would only go into that song at the very end of it. So that was the idea, that I would sort of showcase my own songwriting material in what was supposed to be a cover.”
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Like Soundcloud before it, Bandcamp has become the wild west for the beatsman and multi-hyphenates galore over the last few years. Living, breathing resumes of up-and-coming bedroom producers and small-batch labels alike. Look no further than Jakarta Records and Knxwledge for proof. DJ Harrison, a Richmond, VA native with all the tricks in the book, has made particularly good use of the cloud space with 26 releases over the last 6-plus years.
He returns with another stunner on the 21-track beat tape, TapeCookies2. For the drummer and producer whose recently placed suites on Phonte and Eric Roberson‘s Tigallero and Joyce Wrice‘s Stay Around, the new tape offers a smooth and eclectic spread of heavy-swung heat from a young producer on the cusp of a breakout. And it may not even take a word-wielding sideman to make it work.
Fill the donut-sized hole in your heart with DJ Harrison’s dreamy new beat tape down below and head over to his Bandcamp page to keep digging into his expansive catalog. Hopefully someone scoops this kid up and makes their post-Dilla masterpiece. It’s time.
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Known for her heavily atmospheric and dreamy psychedelic sound that’s aptly described as “desert rock” or an extension of the neo-torch song, Alexandra Savior (full name, Alexandra Savior McDermott) is an American alternative pop/rock singer/songwriter from Portland, Oregon. Developing an eclectic musical taste during her teens, Savior became interested in writing her own songs at the age of 14. Inspired by a broad range of artists such as Otis Redding, Jack White, Amy Winehouse, and Etta James, she began penning her own lyrics and figuring out her artistic direction by logging melody ideas and different guitar techniques via tape recorder.
She first garnered industry attention in 2012, when she uploaded a cover of folk-blues musician Angus Stone’s “Big Jet Plane.” Earning praise from Courtney Love, the magnetic performance also landed the young creative on the radar of multiple industry representatives. The following year, she scrapped her original plans of attending art school and relocated to Los Angeles to pursue her music career more directly. The same year also saw further praise from established artists, particularly from Grammy-nominated Linda Perry, who compared her to Fiona Apple.
Toward the end of 2013, Savior had signed with Columbia Records and begun to work on more material. Subsequently, the label sent some of her material to Arctic Monkeys’ Alex Turner to propose a possible collaboration in order to establish Savior’s sound further. With radically different songwriting structures and style, Turner’s approach began to hone the young singer’s songs along a specific route, more accurately encapsulating Alexandra’s sound, which she describes as “being in the middle of the desert, and being abducted…[a]nd opening up into a desert realm, where there’s a bar with nobody in it, a dark red light in the corner, with a woman crooning in a long black dress.” Such a description exemplified the songwriter’s artistic sensibility and visual approach to her art overall, as opposed to purely focused on the sound of it.
Throughout 2014 and 2015, she got to work on her first full-length effort (under the working title of Strange Portrait) with Turner and producer James Ford of Simian Mobile Disco (Foals, Depeche Mode). Her first demo, “Risk,” then appeared on the second season soundtrack of HBO’s popular anthology crime drama True Detective. Billed on the soundtrack as Alexandra McDermott, she then decided to use her middle name as her last for her stage persona, based on a suggestion from Turner. Savior eventually changed the album’s title to Belladonna of Sadness, which arrived in April of 2017. The record was promoted by the singles “Shades,” “M.T.M.E.,” “Mystery Girl,” and “Mirage” ahead of the record’s release.
Whether surrounded by beating rays of Ethiopian sunshine or melodious waves of sound in a smoky room, Marian Mereba wears the title of your Highness graciously. Her music is a blend between internationally appealing melodies and fine-tuned lyrical ability reminiscent of influences such as Stevie Wonder and Bob Dylan.
Miss Mereba is a college-educated voice of the youth, with music that is the soundtrack for millions of universal stories. The echoes of her sensual voice over versatile, self-produced guitar and piano melodies coupled with lyrics that the whole world can sing to is what sets the immigrant’s daughter apart from otherwise worthy “competition.”
Closing your eyes and listening to Marian Mereba’s music takes you on a flight across the ocean to where everything began, then welcomes you back into a brighter world than the one you remembered.
Yesterday after dropping a rather cryptic tweet, college friends turned R&B duo Majid Al Maskati and Jordan Ullman returned to the airwaves with a new single called “Phases.”
The song is set to appear on the duo’s forthcoming sophomore album of the same name. The sudden releases will definitely kick-start what was looking like a fairly quiet summer for Al Maskati and Ullman – with the exception of their much-anticipated Coachella performance. Per normal, “Phases” sees the guys flawlessly playing their roles – Ullman’s uptempo, synth-heavy production lives seamlessly alongside Maskati’s crooning.
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The clip was shot in Oahu and features a cameo from producer Knxwledge.
Anderson .Paak is working on the follow up to his 2016 album Malibu in Hawaii. The artist shared a short video featuring his NxWorries collaborator Knxwledge yesterday alongside the message, ““Working on the new album in Oahu for a week. (sorry no sxsw).” According to .Paak’s publicist, the album that he is working on is not another NxWorries album but is his first album since signing to Aftermath.
The short video, which catches .Paak in his element on a rooftop, begins with a quote from Nina Simone and includes a rumination on the true nature of freedom. “Being fearless and being able to express, that’s true freedom,” he says. “I feel like I’m closer to God when I make music. I can do extraordinary things.”
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“How do you all even know me?” Tash Sultana asks the crowd during her sold-out show at the Mercury Lounge in New York City’s Lower East Side. The Australian multihyphenate — she sings, plays guitar, loops, beatboxes, and much more — released her debut EP Notion in mid-February, and has since celebrated with a successful U.S. tour.
“I’m seeing it all for the first time,” Sultana tells Billboard while calling from her tour van in San Francisco. “We’ve been doing it straight edge because it’s just too hectic to get really drunk. We’ve been in high spirits, sober spirits.”
Sultana never expected to sell out shows in the States, at least not during her first tour, and echoes the same sentiment she shared at her New York gig several weeks prior: “I’m honestly confused where everybody knows me from.”
Starting as a busker, Sultana enticed crowds with her densely layered production that fuses indie with ambient rock and impressive guitar licks. “[The guitar] is like my third arm,” she says, and estimates her collection to be nearing 35 in total. Both busking and YouTube, the easiest entry point to Sultana, helped her earn the title of Triple J’s Unearthed Artist of the Year in 2016, a feat she followed by signing to Mom + Pop Music at the start of 2017.
Her most-watched video on YouTube, which has garnered over 1.7 million views, is a bedroom recording of her hit song, “Jungle.” The song — and video — best illustrate the sonic science of what Sultana does. In the video, and onstage, she swivels around while tapping looper pedals with her foot, patting a launchpad with her fingers, shredding her guitar and singing through thick clouds of reverb — all self-taught skills (“You only get better at stuff; you don’t get worse,” she says).
The swirl of sounds enveloped in “Jungle” served as a welcome escape at the time Sultana created the song, which she describes as “a product of heartbreak” that was inspired by “a division between my heart and my head.” She relates, “I was at my wits end and just turned the music up, had a jam and that song came out.”
Sultana cites her past toxic relationship as what birthed much of the music on Notion. “I didn’t know what else to do with myself apart from get creative. A lot of us go through that type of stuff, and you have to learn to let it go and move in a different direction.” Considering the success her painful past has brought, she admits, “I’m pretty stoked on it now.”
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Of all the talents Sultana has mastered — she can even beatbox on a cheap wooden windpipe — rerouting a negative situation so that the outcome is positive proves her most impressive. Sultana is well aware that her ability to let go of her past and move forward does not come as easily to others. As such, her music doubles as her platform to help those listening find similar clarity. She says she never meant for her music to have such a mission, and has since sought other ways in which she can help. She became a mental health ambassador for Australia’s BeyondBlue, an organization that provides information and support regarding mental health.
“I think it’s really important to have a journey and talk about your healing process, because people are looking for answers and if you [have any] then you should share that knowledge,” she says. “You only have one thing in your mind and that is your mind; once that’s gone, your whole reality is distorted.”
Fortunately, Sultana is well in touch with her reality. While her career continues to climb, she says her only goal is to be happy. “Anything else that comes along will be fine,” she admits. “If I’m in a good headspace, then it doesn’t matter which direction things go.”
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