Hippo Campus return today with “Kick In The Teeth,” the first new music since last year’s LP3. It comes from a new digital-only EP titled Wasteland, set for release on April 14th. The comeback single plants a stylistic flag for the band: there’s a noticably more freewheeling, twangier edge to the sound and a startlingly straight forward approach to the songwriting. Cowboy era? Maybe? The five song EP comes paired with beautiful creative from Julian Gross, who directed the video above and the art for the project, both horse-forward affairs befitting of this dustier sound. Tracklist and pre-save link below.

Wasteland EP

01 Moonshine
02 Yippie Kai Yay
03 Honeysuckle
04 Probably
05 Kick In The Teeth
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The EP arrives only a few short weeks before the band embarks on a headline tour of some of the biggest venues they’ve ever graced. The iconic Red Rocks is already sold out. The brand new Salt Shed in Chicago is too. Tickets are going fast, so grab them while you still can here.

Jordana & Inner Wave are hitting the road later this week. But it would seem 20 dates just wasn’t enough for them. That’s right, today they’ve come together with a little Valentine’s love letter called “Baby.” A gooey psych-pop duet of the sweetest variety.

Get it wherever you stream your music now. All dates in the tour section and listed below.

TOLEDO’s debut album How It Ends was an accomplished collection of songs about family – a divorce record, a friendship record, an album about those who make us who we are. A heavy subject, indeed, so it’s no wonder the band is back with an addendum in the form of How It Ends [UNRATED EDITION], a deluxe version of the album featuring seven additional tracks. Some are wholly new songs, like the sweeping and gently beautiful “Oak Hill” that arrives today.

“’Oak Hill’ came at a point in our lives when we were both finally able to look back at past relationships and see our own mistakes; not just the faults of others that we typically fixated on,” says the band.”Young men in particular get away with using people under the guise of personal growth. It’s sort of a pathetic plea for forgiveness for being a shithead in your early years.“

Others are revamped or stripped down version of songs from the record and beyond – there’s an old iteration of “Beach Coma,” a lo-fi take on “Hideout,” and a few voice memo moments that encapsulate some of the more magical moments in TOLEDO’s songwriting process.

Tracklist below.

1. Soda Can
2. Boxcutter
3. Hideout
4. Keep It Down!
5. How It Ends
6. Climber
7. Flake
8. L-Train
9. Leopard Skin
10. What Happened to the Menorah?
11. Ghosty
12. Fixing Up the Back Room
13. Oak Hill
14. Shirley
15. Flake (Demo)
16. Snow Day
17. Hideout (Lo-Fi Version)
18. Beach Coma (Demo)
19. Patch

In other news, the band is hitting the road for their first proper headline run in support of How It Ends and in celebration of the upcoming digital deluxe edition. Tickets available over in the tour section.

Sophomore albums are never easy, but they’re especially difficult when your debut makes the kind of lasting mark Samia’s 2020 outing The Baby made. So Honey arrives today with more than a bit of expectation.

In many ways it’s a totally different animal than The Baby – less rough around the edges, more lyrically direct, content to dwell in quieter passages. But it’s also a record about perspective, and as such interrogates some of the same ideas (even some of the same stories) that Samia tackled on The Baby, only from a new, more assured vantage. The Baby and its songs’ protagonists wanted approval. Honey doesn’t need it because it exclusively traffics in the sort of unvarnished truths that render approval irrelevant.

It’s Samia at her most bare, brave & beautiful. Filled with the courage of hindsight.

Listen deep wherever you stream music. Or own a copy below. The record deserves it.

Honey is out on Friday (pre-save or pre-order here), but there’s one more double single before we get to the finish line. A linked pair like “Pink Balloon” & “Sea Lions” before it, “Honey” & “Breathing Song” are both deeply sad. Only one of them does its best to convince itself that’s not true. The video for “Honey,” which also arrived this morning, was directed by Jacq Justice and features several versions of Samia all doing their best to keep it together, to varying degrees of success.

“To me Honey is the saddest song I’ve ever written, because it’s mocking my attempt to convince people I was good,” says Samia. “Caleb [Wright] turned it into a campfire song, though, and I love that it can be interpreted as fun too.”

Pre-orders are still available, with the final sweetart swirl variant arriving on Bandcamp earlier this month. Limited to 500 copies, and nearly sold out already. All pre-order options below.

Next month, Samia kicks off her US tour in support of Honey. She’ll be joined on the road by Tommy Lefroy. Brooklyn Steel is already sold out. Tickets to the rest of the dates available over in the tour section. All dates below.

Today we are thrilled to release No Fun, the new EP from Philly’s Crooks & Nannies. Last year, you heard the spare “control” and fragile yet powerful “Sorry” & the slow-building title-track (embedded above) dropped earlier this week. The cassette version of the EP features three exclusive tracks: “Liquor Store,” “Cantaloupe,” & “3am.” Crooks songs are like an exposed nerve – all tensions, spasms, singalongs and pathos – and those three are no exception. Cassettes available here.

The band will be playing an EP release show in Philly this weekend, alongside Empath & Another Michael. Tickets here.

More soon.

You’ve already heard “Kill Her Freak Out” & “Mad At Me” from Honey, Samia’s long-awaited follow up to 2020’s The Baby and 2021’s Scout EP. Today, the Nashville-via-NYC songwriter returns with two more emphatic reasons to pay attention, a pair of linked ruminations on the end of a relationship.

“Pink Balloon is trying to make amends by looking at it from a bird’s eye after everything got too complicated,” says Samia. “Sea Lions is not zoomed out – stewing in it, too angry to work it out or let it go, finding old voicemails and trying to decide where it went wrong on a loop until you have to run it off, running until you were never angry in the first place.”

A pair of twins in music video form arrived last night alongside the single, each directed by Samia with friend & collaborator Jacqueline Justice. While the palate of “Pink Balloon” matches that song’s spare intensity, both the video and track “Sea Lions” play coy with their intentions until exploding into a surprise climax.

The double single’s Max Taeuschel artwork, which mixes photos shot by Justice on the video set with handwritten lyrics from Samia, is below.

Honey is set for release January 27th of 2023, and is available for pre-order in multiple formats. Tickets for the extensive Honey tour are available now over in the tour section.

Hippo Campus don’t stop. They can’t. They just wrapped the second leg of their LP3 tour last month, and they’re back this morning announcing a full slate of BIG shows in spring 2023. Expanding on the already-announced Red Rocks show that went up last month, these shows will be on sale this Friday at 11am local.

More soon.

Jordana’s new EP I’m Doing Well, Thanks For Asking is out now. It’s the kind of confidence check EP that manages to pull from everything that came before it, while finding out how to improve upon all the elements that made Jordana so endearing in the first place. If you liked the dreaminess of the TV Girl collab EP Summer’s Over, it’s here. If you liked the more softly bittersweet moments of Something To Say To You, you won’t be disappointed. If you’re chasing the overt pop of Face The Wall, yep, present.

Following the previously released “Is It Worth It Now?” and “SYT” comes “You’re In The Way.” On this single, Jordana recalls the leathery indie pop she explored on Something To Say To You, with a track that is built around a simple drum loop, guitar strums and her impeccable voice. Like much of the EP the subject matter centers on self-discovery in the wake of change. “It’s about getting to know yourself again after seemingly wasting time investing in someone else,” she explains. Listen to the song and watch its The Valdez-directed video above.

Fresh off her Remi Wolf support dates, Jordana is in the middle of her first ever ex-US tour, hitting Pitchfork London last night and Paris later this week, with a few headlines & a Rough Trade instore for good measure. Tickets for all available in our tour section.

Back in September we announced Samia‘s sophomore album Honey on the back of the spare & beautiful lead single “Kill Her Freak Out.” Today Samia returns with something different: “Mad At Me” is a firework display of gas pedal indie pop (produced by Rostam, guest verse from papa mbye) that celebrates the time honored tradition of faking it till you make it.

“The lyrics for Mad At Me came from a poem I’d written about imagining what it’d be like to stop caring about what anyone was thinking. I was cosplaying a position that I haven’t experienced which is of literally any confidence in my point of view,” says Samia. That’s right, even the fun songs are a little in their own head.

The video, available above, was directed by Samia herself alongside regular visual collaborator Muriel Knudson. “In the video we tried to embody that character,” Samia continues, “a bunch of girls having a good time in spite of it all. It is a big lie.”

The album is currently available for pre-order in multiple formats, each linked below.

In other news, yesterday was Samia’s first stop on Maggie Roger’s Feral Joy tour in Leeds, UK. It’s the first opportunity anyone outside of North America has had to see Samia perform her songs live. The tour has several more stops, while Samia will be playing her own sold out(!) XOYO gig and a stop at Pitchfork London while she’s in the UK.

Back stateside, US tour in early 2023 with Tommy Lefroy is on sale now. Get tickets for all dates over in our tour section.