The third installment in the Honey Reimagined Single Series arrives today in the form of a bedroom pop reinvention of Samia’s “To Me It Was” by Hovvdy.

Samia shares: “‘To Me It Was’ is one of a few songs on Honey that existed in a bunch of different iterations before its final form. I wrote it with Christian Lee Hutson a year before we started making the record. We both played separate versions live in our sets a few times. When I first started playing it out it was this big rave up of a rock song. In the studio and in the context of the record the song just made more sense stripped down, with this really warm back porch feeling. Hovvdy turning it into a bedroom pop song feels exactly right – the perfect middle ground.”

Real Life is one of the most unflinching & affecting full-lengths we’ve ever released. Musically omnivorous. Unafraid to interrogate ideas about death, identity, depression — the album couldn’t bear a more fitting name. The band celebrated the release ealier this week with a music video for “Big Mouth Bass,” directed by Mannequin Pussy’s Marisa Dabice.  

Limited LPs still available on Bandcamp & in indie record shops – on highlighter yellow & ultra clear vinyl and limited edition cassette. Purchase links below.

Rubblebucket are back today with a reimagining of the title-track from their most recent record, Earth Worship. They enlisted the one and only Kimbra to make it over and add an additional verse.

“We are blessed that our friend Kimbra agreed to help us re-invent this song from its dark, orchestral new-disco origins to an epic sweaty dance-floor banger. Kimbra actually wrote & sung the lush 3rd verse in this version, which is so dramatically different that we gave the song the new name “Abbreviation,”” says Rubblebucket’s Kal Traver. “The title is derived from the chorus lyrics searching for a way through the pain asking “can you help me find an abbreviation to this feeling i’m in right now?”

In other news, the band recently announced a run of fall dates throughout the US. Tickets available now over on the RB artist page.

Today Arcy Drive release their first single with us. “Wicked Styley” It’s a flush of wirey guitars and super-sized vocal swoon. And it’s arriving just in time for the second leg of the band’s epic Stattic Tour, which kicked off earlier this year. Tickets available here.

Last weekend, the band camped out in Chicago to play for the Lollapalooza crowds. Lots of kids showed up, as you can see in the pic below.

Today Samia continues her Honey Reimagined Single Series with a beautifully spare Maya Hawke cover of the anthemic title-track.

“When we were recording Honey for the album we added this ironic depth by turning what was originally a painful song into a kind of campfire signalong — big bouncy guitars, a happy melody, that endless refrain,” says Samia. “So I was eager to hear what Maya would do with it. Surprisingly, she stripped all of the campfire away. In her version you can hear every bit of the desperation in how spare the production is. Exploring these new vantage points in my own work is exactly what draws me to the Reimagined concept.”

Maya Hawke shares: “It’s an amazing thing when a favorite person writes a favorite song. I was honored to be asked to cover ‘Honey’ and I wanted to bring out the sadness I felt behind the celebration. I loved working with Will Graefe as a producer. I’ve never recorded a song without him and experiencing him as a producer was even better.”

Maya’s cover of “Honey” follows Blondshell’s cover of “Charm You” which gained notice upon its June release from the likes of Billboard who named the “buoyant album standout” one of their favorite Cool New Pop Songs, and Paste who deemed the “imploring and poutily enamored” cover to be one of their Best New Songs. Blondshell and Maya Hawke spoke about their mutual appreciation for Samia during a recent appearance on the Talkhouse Podcast, which you can listen to here.

In other news, Samia recently added additional tour dates with Noah Kahan this fall, and a notable appearance supporting Boygenius on September 30th at Philadelphia’s Mann Center. She’ll also perform at festivals including Outside Lands, Thing & All Thigns Go in the US, and End of the Road & Electric Picnic around her upcoming UK show at The Forum. Check the tour section for all dates.

Crooks & Nannies return today with “Country Bar,” the third pre-release single from their new record Real Life, which arrives August 25th. The new track builds around a frantic acoustic guitar strum, and as Stereogum says “merges a confessional singer-songwriter approach with the trappings of artsy indie rock, veering from straight-ahead guitars to grand detonations to sparse intimacy and back around to a louder, mildly twangy conclusion.”

Of the song, Max Rafter shares:

“I started to write this song during a budding romance. There were so many secret unspoken feelings. It felt exciting, and I wanted more. I could only meet them as far as they were willing to go. I thought that if I put in enough work, things would click into place. I thought if I wanted something hard enough, there was no reason it couldn’t happen. It’s about being blinded by love, zoomed in, and hopeful. Knowing it won’t work but trying so hard anyway.

I’ve always been a person who wants to fix relationships that aren’t working rather than walk away, at times to my own detriment. “Country Bar” hits on those themes, looking with rose colored glasses at a relationship.”

Last month the band announced a run of tour dates around the album’s release. Flyer below, tickets available in our tour section now.

Today we’re so excited to welcome Arcy Drive to the Grand Jury family.

These four barefoot kids from Northport, NY have spent the last year traversing the US (in a school bus they converted into tour digs themselves!), selling out shows from Bowery Ballroom in NYC to the Moroccan Lounge in LA. There’s an earnest sense of discovery to these rambunctious rock songs, small celebrations of big feelings that can connect with pretty much anyone.

Our first single with the band, “Wicked Styley,” is due August 11th. It’s available for pre-save now. More chances to catch the band live are on the horizon, too – Lollapalooza in Chicago, select dates with Spacey Jane, Goth Babe and our pal Briston Maroney. Hit their artist page for all the dates.

Single number two from the forthcoming Real Life is “Weather,” a Sam song that starts slow before exploding into big fits of chaos and pathos. The dynamic swing is something the band masters with their debut LP, coming in August. The video hints at the story behind the song’s creation, a song written by Huntington during a long bike ride that turned into an even longer walk, and the nights chaos is mirrored in its instrumentation.

She explains: “It was spring of 2020, and despite being the first warm night of the season, the city was eerily empty. After weeks of being cooped up I wanted to see something new and decided to make a rule for myself: If I came across an unfamiliar street I was required to turn down it. Drunk and restless, I biked for hours, until my phone died and I realized I was lost. I was in a non-residential area that I didn’t recognize and it was very late. In Philly many of the major streets are numbered, but I was having difficulty finding one. I seemed to be trapped in a labyrinth of exit ramps, warehouses and negative space. By the time I made it home, I had sweated through my shirt, popped a tire, had a bizarre encounter with a flock of geese, stumbled upon a massive house fire, and written a song. The bike ride felt like some kind of strange upsetting dream and I think deeply informed the tone of Weather. The song is about feeling hollow.”

“The vocals throughout this track are from the original demo. My roommate came home while I was recording them and, feeling self-conscious about the lyrics, I sang the ending section as a whisper. I figured it would be a placeholder but we decided to lean in, emphasizing the fragility in the vocal performance and doing everything in our power to make the instrumental go really fucking hard. There are like 8 layers of guitar feedback. We hit a trash can with a mallet and layered it over the snare. That’s our engineer, Mark Water, screaming. The abrupt ending symbolizes death, perhaps a life cut short.”

In other news, the band just announced a series of dates around the album’s release. Tickets on sale this Friday!

Real Life is available for pre-order now – on highlighter yellow & ultra clear vinyl and limited edition cassette. Purchase links below.

Earlier this week Samia shared a new cover of “Charm You” recorded by Blondshell, the first in a series of single releases dubbed “Honey Reimagined” featuring a variety of artists (including Maya Hawke, Hovvdy, Ruston Kelly + more TBA) reinterpreting songs from Honey.

This collection of singles is inspired by 2021’s The Baby Reimagined, which featured versions of songs from Samia’s breakthrough debut LP, The Baby, recorded by Bartees Strange, Briston Maroney, MICHELLE, Anjimile, Christian Lee Hutson and more.

Samia shares: “I’ve always been vocal about community being important to me. I couldn’t do this without my friends. We reimagined The Baby in 2020 because we were all stuck at home during the pandemic but the idea felt so true to the ethos of this project that I wanted to try it again with Honey. It’s always exciting to give songs a new life, especially with such great musicians involved.”

Blondshell shares: “I’ve been inspired by Samia for such a long time. She puts so much of herself into her songs, so much love for people and places. That was one of the things that stood out to me most about Honey – all of the friendship and joy that cut through darkness. I really felt that on ‘Charm You’ and I’m so happy to be part of her project.”

In other news, Samia just announced more dates – a few supporting Noah Kahan, and a headline run with Venus & The Flytraps. Tickets available at samiaband.com.

“Sparks” has been a live staple for Jordana for a while. Anyone who saw her 2021 tour with TV Girl, likely saw her silence rooms with this one late in her set. So to celebrate another upcoming tour (announcing today – details below!), she’s released a studio version of the track. Listen above, or wherever you get music.

Now about that tour: Jordana will be hitting the road this Fall with rising indie pop rebel Dev Lemons. Tickets on sale this Friday at 10am local – you can snag them in our tour section. Flyer below.