New Music from Sleater-Kinney, Soda Blonde, Night Talks, J Mascis, Sarah Jarosz

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Sleater-Kinney: Say It Like You Mean It

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Corin Tucker and Carrie Brownstein will release their latest album, Little Rope, in January. Tucker takes the lead vocal on this single about parting words: "Say it like you mean it / I need to hear it before you go."  

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J Mascis: Can't Believe We're Here

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Here's a taste of What Do We Do Now, the upcoming fifth solo album by the Dinosaur Jr. frontman. Word is he played all the instruments except keyboards, provided by Ken Mauri from the B-52’s, and pedal steel, by Ontario's Matthew “Doc” Dunn. “When I’m writing for the band,” Mascis says, “I’m always trying to think of doing things Lou and Murph would fit into. For myself, I’m thinking more about what I can do with just an acoustic guitar, even for the leads. Of course, this time, I added full drums and electric leads, so it ended up sounding a lot more like a band record.”

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Night Talks: Running On A Cloud

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The latest single from this LA trio is inspired by the old Roadrunner cartoons. "There’d always be a moment where Wile. E Coyote would cut off a tree branch he was sitting on or run off the side of a cliff, so focused on what he was doing that he wouldn’t fall down until he stopped to think."

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Soda Blonde: Boys

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This Irish band spins out another single from its recently released second album, Dream Big, as it embarks on a tour around Europe. The Irish Times says the song is "laced with romantic ambiguity, in lines like, 'Somebody’s been yelling in my head that you’re the wrong one.'"

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Sarah Jarosz: When The Lights Go Out

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On her upcoming seventh album, Polaroid Lovers, Jarosz says each song "is a snapshot of different love stories. This one is about being intrigued before the start of a relationship…dreaming about the unknown of it all." It's a co-write with Jon Randall and Gordie Sampson. "Gordie, who comes from a Cape Breton musical background, suggested we write something in 6/8, started grooving, and before we knew it we were off and running."

New indie music by San Fermin, Vanishing Shores, Adult Leisure, Krooked Kings, Orwells '84

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San Fermin: Didn't Want You To

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The Brooklyn group will release its fifth studio album, Arms, in February. Claire Wellin takes the lead vocal on this single. Composer-songwriter-band-leader Ellis Ludwig-Leone says “I had this feeling after going through a breakup, like, ‘well screw you, if you don’t want to be with me, I don’t want to be with you,’ which turns out to be a pretty universal feeling. The wordplay was fun, messing around with different inflections of the refrain to hint at different meanings.” It reminds us of the 10,000 Maniacs song "I Don't Want You Too" - so of course we'll have to segue them now and then. 

Photo by Alex S K Brown

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Vanishing Shores: Traffic Patterns

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The Cleveland band led by Kevin Bianchi has slipped out another single, its fourth this year. We presume they'll be collected in the album Possible Light, but we don't have a release date on that yet. This song's lyric suggests to us a road trip during which the narrator recognizes the signs of impending breakup: "I remember you in Mojave / The heat burning through our clothes / You were speaking of a distant future / I felt the hum of closing doors."

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Adult Leisure: Bad Idea

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Last month we featured the single "All For You," and now we pick up another track from Present State of Joy and Grief, the sophomore EP from this indie band out of Bristol, UK. Full disclosure: This song hit British airwaves last summer, but we're invoking the rule that if it's new to us, it can go in our New Music bin.

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Krooked Kings: Headhunters

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This band got its start in Salt Lake City, Utah, in 2019 and has been developing its style of "heartfelt indie-rock music." We're not sure what to make of the claim that their influences include The Strokes and Bon Iver - neither is evident on this track, but it's a catchy little number.  

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Orwells '84: Are We Brothers?

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This indie-folk group out of Dundalk, Ireland, released their debut EP, Truth Is The First Victim, in 2019 - after which their recording plans were interrupted by the pandemic. Once they were able to get back to studio work, they had a couple dozen new songs to work with, and the result was a 14-track debut LP. We seem to have missed its release earlier this year, but they brought it to our attention by breaking out this track as a single.

New Music: Gaslight Anthem, Sam Roberts Band, Aurora, Cloud Nothings, Crack The Sky

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Gaslight Anthem: Little Fires

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The new album History Books is the New Jersey-based band's sixth LP and its first in nine years. Frontman Brian Fallon says this track is "an empowerment song, about refusing to play along with the kind of people who always seem to be throwing a grenade into the room for no particular reason." Previously added to our big mix: advance singles "History Books" and "Positive Charge." 

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Sam Roberts Band: Afterlife

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With the release of The Adventures of Ben Blank, we're highlighting this track with a misleading title. Rather than a meditation on the eternal, the lyric insists on getting everything we can out of life on earth: "I'm gonna get my kicks on this side of the Styx."

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Aurora: Your Blood

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Photo by Wanda Martin

The Norwegian artist's new single, writes NME, "sees her deliver some cathartic vocals alongside some synth-infused instrumentals."

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Cloud Nothings: Final Summer

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Photo by Chad Butler

The Cleveland trio's new single, says lead singer/guitarist Dylan Baldi, is about “reconciling past versions of myself with the self I see when I look in the mirror every morning."

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Crack The Sky: Going Downtown

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On their 20th LP, From The Wood, the veteran prog-rock band sets aside its electric guitars and synths in favor of mostly-acoustic instrumentation. Most of its ten songs are rather dark ruminations by lead singer-songwriter John Palumbo, but our pick for the New Music Bin is a fun, bluesy shuffle.

Latest adds to our New Music bin: The Beatles, Cold War Kids, MGMT, Pretenders, Glass Violet

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The Beatles: Now and Then

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The "final" single by the electronically reconstituted band is a nostalgia trip that's hard to resist for those of us who remember the lads at their heyday or have come to know and appreciate their music in the decades since.

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Cold War Kids: Run Away With Me

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The self-titled 10th album from the California-based band "offers a delightful blend of lively, upbeat tunes, soothing rock melodies, and some heartfelt ballads," writes Spill Magazine. This is certainly one of the lively numbers.

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MGMT: Mother Nature

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Here's the first single from the Middletown, Connecticut duo's upcoming fifth album, Loss of Life. The band says the song "outlines the archetypical MGMT mythology of one hero attempting to get the other hero to come on the journey that they 'must' go on. One part sounds like Oasis." 

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Pretenders: Let the Sun Come In

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Before Relentless gets too not-new to qualify for our New Music bin, we wanted to dip back into the LP and feature another track.

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Glass Violet: Oxygen

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We previously featured a couple of singles from this Bristol, UK, band. Along with this latest comes word that an eight-song EP is releasing this week.