Latest news with #DeadOceans
Scoop
09-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Scoop
UK Post-Punks SHAME Share New Single + Video 'Quiet Life'
Today, shame release 'Quiet Life', the second single/video from their new album Cutthroat, out 5th September via Dead Oceans. On the heels of title track, 'Cutthroat', praised by DIY as 'Crashing in with an urgent, alluring energy, shame's return is here to blow the cobwebs away…,' 'Quiet Life' is a snarling rockabilly track in the vein of The Gun Club and The Cramps. Of the track, vocalist Charlie Steen says: ''Quiet Life' is about someone in a shitty relationship. It's about the judgment they receive and the struggle that they have to go through, trying to understand the conflict they face, of wanting a better life… but being stuck.' In the song's opening lines, Steen sings, 'Spent too much time on my knees. / Round here nothing's good for me, / But I still can't make the choice to leave.' The video, directed by Pedro Takahashi and produced by FRIEND, features the band and friends venting their pent-up frustrations in a run-down office building. Cutthroat is Shame at their blistering best; an unapologetic new album made with Grammy winning producer John Congleton at the helm. 'It's about the cowards, the cunts, the hypocrites,' says vocalist Charlie Steen. 'Let's face it, there's a lot of them around right now.' Still in their twenties and having proved themselves several times over via legendary live shows and three critically-acclaimed albums, the five childhood friends - Charlie Steen, guitarists Sean Coyle-Smith and Eddie Green, bassist Josh Finerty and drummer Charlie Forbes - went into Cutthroat ready to create a new Ground Zero. 'This is about who we are,' says Steen. 'Our live shows aren't performance art - they're direct, confrontational and raw. That's always been the root of us. We live in crazy times. But it's not about 'Poor me.' It's about 'Fuck you'.' Crucial to this incendiary new outlook was producer John Congleton (St. Vincent, Angel Olsen). From their initial meeting, Congleton's no-bullshit approach became a guiding force to streamline the band's ideas. Stamped throughout with Shame's trademark sense of humour, the album takes on the big issues of today and gleefully toys with them. With Trump in the Whitehouse and Shame holed up in Salvation Studios in Brighton, they cast a merciless eye on themes of conflict and corruption; hunger and desire; lust, envy and the omnipresent shadow of cowardice. Musically, too, the record plays with visceral new ideas. Making electronic music on tour for fun, Coyle-Smith had previously seen the loops he was crafting as a separate entity to the things he wrote for Shame. Then, he realised, maybe they didn't have to be. 'This time, anything could go if it sounded good and you got it right,' he says. Musically, too, the record plays with visceral new ideas. Making electronic music on tour for fun, Coyle-Smith had previously seen the loops he was crafting as a separate entity to the things he wrote for shame. Then, he realised, maybe they didn't have to be. ' This time, anything could go if it sounded good and you got it right,' he says. This cheeky self-awareness, too, is important. The result is an album that revels in the idiosyncrasies of life, raising an eyebrow and asking the ugly questions that so often get tactfully brushed over. But the one answer that Cutthroat gives with a resounding flourish is that, right now, shame have never sounded better.
Scoop
18-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Scoop
Wednesday Announce New Album 'Bleeds'
Wednesday announce their anticipated new album, Bleeds, due 19th September via Dead Oceans. With Bleeds Wednesday present an intoxicating collection of narrative-heavy Southern rock that—like many of the most arresting passages from the North Carolina band's discography—thoughtfully explores the vivid link between curiosity and confession. Bleeds i s a patchwork-style triumph of literary allusions and outlaw grit, of place-based poetry and hair-raising noise. Karly Hartzman —founder, frontwoman, and primary lyricist—credits Wednesday's tightened grasp on their own identity to time spent collaborating on previous albums, plus a tour schedule that's been both rewarding and relentless. 'Bleeds is the spiritual successor to Rat Saw God, and I think the quintessential 'Wednesday Creek Rock' album,' Hartzman said, articulating satisfaction with the ways her band has sharpened its trademark sound, how they've refined the formula that makes them one of the most interesting rock bands of their generation. 'This is what Wednesday songs are supposed to sound like,' she said. 'We've devoted a lot of our lives to figuring this out—and I feel like we did.' 'Wound Up Here (By Holdin On),' released today alongside a video by Joriel Cura, is a perfect example of this alchemy. "This song is inspired by a story my friend told me, from when he had to pull a body out of a creek in West Virginia. Someone had drowned but they took a few days to resurface because of the current,' Hartzman explains. ''I wound up here by holdin on' is a line from my friend Evan Gray's poetry book: Thickets Swamped in a Fence-Coated Briars. He gave me and Jake a copy of it to read on tour once and that line stuck out to me as pure genius so I stole it and wrote the rest of the song in my own words around it." Last month the band shared 'Elderberry Wine,' a twangy and timeless new single, to wide critical praise that included being named 'Best New Track' by Pitchfork, one of 'The Best Songs of 2025 So Far' by TIME Magazine and praised by The Guardian in their playlist as a 'pedal-steel-sweetened heartwarmer'. The band performed the track and made their television debut on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert upon its release. Just like Rat Saw God, one of the defining rock & roll records of the 2020s so far, Bleeds came together at Drop of Sun in Asheville and was produced by Alex Farrar, who's been recording the band since Twin Plagues. Hartzman again brought demos to the studio, where she and her bandmates— Xandy Chelmis (lap steel, pedal steel), Alan Miller (drums), Ethan Baechtold (bass, piano), and Jake 'MJ' Lenderman (guitar)—worked as a team to bulk-up the compositions with the exact right amounts of country truth-telling, indie-pop hooks, and noisy sludge. More than ever, the precise proportions were steered by the lyricism—not only its tone or subject matter, but also the actual sound of the words, as well as Hartzman's masterfully subjective approach to detail selection. BLEEDS TRACKLISTING: 1. Reality TV Argument Bleeds 2. Townies 3. Wound Up Here (By Holdin On) 4. Elderberry Wine 5. Phish Pepsi 6. Candy Breath 7. The Way Love Goes 8. Pick Up That Knife 9. Wasp 10. Bitter Everyday 11. Carolina Murder Suicide 12. Gary's II
Yahoo
18-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Wednesday Preview New Album With Gothic Teenage Tragedy ‘Wound Up Here (By Holdin On)'
It's Wednesday yet again, which means it's only right for North Carolina indie–rock favorites Wednesday to drop a new song, 'Wound Up Here (By Holdin On),' and announce their next album, Bleeds, will be out Sept. 19 via Dead Oceans. Following the breezy alt-country single, 'Elderberry Wine,' 'Wound Up Here' highlights Wednesday's heavier alt-rock side with moody, atmospheric verses building into big riff choruses. In a statement, Karly Hartzman said the song was inspired by a story a friend told her about the time he 'had to pull a body out of a creek in West Virginia. Someone had drowned but they took a few days to resurface because of the current.' More from Rolling Stone 2025 Americana Awards Nominations: Charley Crockett, MJ Lenderman, and More Wednesday Return With 'Elderberry Wine,' a Love Song About Finding That 'Delicate Balance' the Beaches, Wet Leg, MJ Lenderman to Headline Rolling Stone's Rock & Roll Tour The accompanying lyrics are appropriately eerie and unsettling, but with a touch of dull realism. 'Found him drowned in the creek,' Hartzman sings on the first verse. 'Face was puffy/They hung his dirty jersey up in a trophy case/Next to his girlfriend in a picture with a varsity face.' As for the song's chorus — 'I wound up here by holdin on' — Hartzman said she borrowed the line from a piece in her friend Evan Gray's poetry book, Thickets Swamped in Fence-Coated Briars. '[T]hat line stuck out to me as pure genius so I stole it and wrote the rest of the song in my own words around it,' she said. Both 'Wound Up Here' and 'Elderberry Wine' are set to appear on Bleeds, which follows Wednesday's acclaimed 2023 album, Rat Saw God. The album was recorded at Asheville's Drop of Sun Studios, with longtime producer Alex Farrar at the helm again. Hartzman recorded the LP with bandmates Xandy Chelmis, Alan Miller, Ethan Baechtold, and Jake 'MJ' Lenderman. (Though he plays on the record, Lenderman will no longer be touring with Wednesday.) Wednesday will hit the road in support of Bleeds this fall, with the run kicking off Oct. 9 in Santa Fe and wrapping Nov. 21 in Washington D.C. Tickets are on sale now, with full info available on the band's website. Track List1. 'Reality TV Argument Bleeds'2. 'Townies'3. 'Wound Up Here (By Holdin On)'4. 'Elderberry Wine'5. 'Phish Pepsi'6. 'Candy Breath'7. 'The Way Love Goes'8. 'Pick Up That Knife'9. 'Wasp'10. 'Bitter Everyday'11. 'Carolina Murder Suicide'12. 'Gary's II' Best of Rolling Stone Sly and the Family Stone: 20 Essential Songs The 50 Greatest Eminem Songs All 274 of Taylor Swift's Songs, Ranked
Los Angeles Times
18-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
How Jensen McRae became L.A.'s next great songwriter
Jensen McRae is still chewing over something her therapist told her during their first session together. 'I was talking about how sensitive I am and how I was feeling all these feelings,' the 27-year-old singer and songwriter recalls, 'and she was like, 'You have yet to describe a feeling to me — everything you've described is a thought.'' McRae's eyes widen behind her stylish glasses. 'That destroyed me. She said, 'Feelings are in your body. Thoughts are in your head.' 'This was like six years ago, and I think about it constantly.' A proudly bookish Los Angeles native whose academic ambitions took her to the competitive Harvard-Westlake School, McRae wrote her first song at around age 8; by the time she was a teenager, music had become her way to cope with the cruelty of the world. Yet when she looks back at the stuff she wrote when she was younger, what strikes her isn't that it was too raw — it's that it wasn't raw enough. 'I think I was trying to intellectualize my feelings to get away from being vulnerable,' she says. 'Now I know there's room for both — there's a way to be intellectually rigorous about my sensitivity.' Indeed there is, as McRae demonstrates on her knockout of a sophomore album, 'I Don't Know How But They Found Me!' Released in April by the respected indie label Dead Oceans (whose other acts include Mitski and Phoebe Bridgers), the LP documents the dissolution of two romantic relationships in gleaming acoustic pop songs that use gut-punch emotional detail to ponder complicated ideas of gender, privilege and abuse. In 'Massachusetts,' a snippet of which blew up when she posted it on TikTok in 2023, she captures the private universe she shared with an ex, while 'Let Me Be Wrong' thrums with an overachiever's desperation: 'Something twisted in my chest says I'm good but not the best,' she sings, the rhyme so neat that you can almost see her awaiting the listener's approving nod. 'I Can Change Him' is an unsparing account of the narrator's savior complex that McRae was tempted to leave off the album until her team convinced her otherwise. 'I think of myself as an evolved and self-actualized woman,' she says with a laugh. 'So the admission that I thought it would be my love that transforms this person — I mean, it's super embarrassing.' Then there's 'Savannah,' which lays out the lasting damage left behind after a breakup, and the chilling 'Daffodils,' in which McRae sings about a guy who 'steals base while I sleep.' McRae's songs don't flinch from trauma, but they can also be very funny. 'I'd like to blame the drugs,' she sings, longing for toxic old comforts in a song called 'I Don't Do Drugs.' And here's how she brings the guy in 'I Can Change Him' to life in just a few lines: Same old eight-dollar cologneSame old he can't be aloneSame old cigarettes he rollsSame old Cozmo's 'Plastic Soul' Asked whether she'd rather make someone laugh or cry, McRae needs no time to think. 'I'm always proud when I make someone cry,' she says as she sits on a park bench in Silver Lake on a recent afternoon. 'But more important to me than being the sad girl is that I'm funny — that's way more important to my identity.' She smiles. 'I've definitely made dark jokes where people are like, 'That's horrible that you think you can joke about that,'' she says. 'I'm like, 'It's my thing — the sad thing happened to me.'' McRae's music has attracted some famous fans. In 2024 she opened for Noah Kahan on tour, and she recently jammed with Justin Bieber at his place after the former teen idol reached out on Instagram with kind words about 'Massachusetts.' Last month, McRae — a graduate of USC's Thornton School of Music — played a pair of packed hometown shows at the El Rey where she introduced 'Savannah' by telling the crowd, 'You are not defined by the worst thing that ever happened to you.' 'Jensen is extremely … if I say the word 'gifted,' you'll be like, 'okay' — but she truly is a gifted individual,' says Patrice Rushen, the veteran jazz and R&B musician who mentored McRae as chair of the Thornton School's popular music program. (Among the classics McRae learned to perform during her studies was Rushen's 1982 'Forget Me Nots.') Rushen praises the depth and precision of McRae's songwriting — 'her ability to see beyond what's right in front of her and to find just the right word or texture in her storytelling.' 'I adored her as a student,' Rushen adds. McRae was born in Santa Monica and grew up in Woodland Hills in a tight-knit family; her dad is Black and her mom is Jewish, and she has two brothers — the older of whom is her business manager, the younger of whom plays keyboard in her road band. The singer describes herself as both a goody two-shoes and a teacher's pet, which she affectionately blames on her father, a lawyer who went to UCLA and Harvard Law School. 'He was born in 1965 — his birth certificate says 'Negro' on it, which is crazy,' she says. 'His whole life, it was: 'You have to be twice as good to get half as far.' And even though I was born in the '90s, that was still kind of instilled in us. 'Especially being at Harvard-Westlake,' she adds. 'I was one of the few Black kids, and I didn't want to be underestimated. Now, I find being underestimated kind of funny because I have so much confidence in my own ability that when someone thinks I'm not gifted in whatever way, I'm like, 'Oh, you'll find out you're wrong soon enough.'' Having absorbed the songwriting fundamentals of James Taylor, Sara Bareilles and Taylor Swift, McRae entered USC in 2015 and played her first gig — 'the first one that wasn't a school talent show,' she clarifies — at L.A.'s Hotel Cafe after her freshman year. 'I don't know if my mom knows this, but I told her not to come,' she recalls with a laugh. 'I was like, 'I'm 18 — I'm grown up now — and I'm gonna be hanging with all these cool people.'' In fact, her audience that night consisted of only the bartender and the other acts on the bill. Her creative breakthrough came when she wrote her song 'White Boy' when she was 20. It's about feeling invisible, and McRae knew she'd achieved something because 'when I finished it, I was like, 'I can never play this in front of anyone.'' A few years later, during the COVID-19 pandemic, she fired off a jokey tweet imagining that Bridgers would soon write a song about 'hooking up in the car while waiting in line to get vaccinated at dodger stadium'; the post went viral, racking up shares from thousands of people, including Bridgers. 'I had to put my phone in a drawer because it was buzzing so much,' says McRae, who ended up writing the song herself and calling it 'Immune.' For 'I Don't Know How But They Found Me!' — the title borrows a line of dialogue from 'Back to the Future' — McRae sought a lusher sound than she got on her folky 2022 debut; she recorded the album in North Carolina with the producer Brad Cook, who's also worked with Bon Iver and Waxahatchee and who helped fill out the songs with appealing traces of turn-of-the-millennium pop by Avril Lavigne and Ashlee Simpson. As a singer, McRae can expertly control the sob in her voice, as in 'Tuesday,' a stark piano ballad about a betrayal made all the more painful by how little it meant to the traitor. At the El Rey, McRae doubled down on that theme in a florid yet intimate rendition of 'I Can't Make You Love Me,' the Mike Reid/Allen Shamblin tune that Bonnie Raitt turned into one of pop's greatest anthems of dejection. What did McRae learn about songwriting at USC? She mentions a technique called 'toggling,' which one professor illustrated using John Mayer's 'Why Georgia.' 'The first line is, 'I'm driving up '85 in the kind of morning that lasts all afternoon,'' McRae says. 'That's a description of the outside world. Then the next line is, 'I'm just stuck inside the gloom,' toggling back to the internal emotion. That's something I pay attention to now. If I'm writing a verse, I'll do scene-setting, scene-setting, scene-setting, then how do I feel about it?' McRae is particularly good at dropping the listener into a scenario, as in 'Savannah,' which starts: 'There is an intersection in your college town with your name on it.' To get to that kind of intriguing specificity, she'll sometimes write six or eight lines of a verse, to discard the first few — 'Those are often just filler words,' she says — and 'rearrange the rest so that whatever I had at the end goes at the top. Now I have to beat that.' For all her craft, McRae knows that songwriting is just one of the skills required of any aspiring pop star. She loves performing on the road, though touring has become 'physically punishing,' as she puts it, since she was diagnosed a few years ago with a thyroid condition and chronic hives, both of which have led to a severely restricted diet. She recently posted a TikTok in which she detailed her regimen of medications — one attempt, she says, to bring some visibility to the topic of chronic illness. (That said, McRae admits to being unsettled by the DM she received the other day from a fan who recognized her at her allergist's office: 'They're like, 'Hey, I saw you — I was going in to get my shots too.'') McRae views social media more broadly as 'a factory that I clock into and clock out of.' She's well aware that it's what enabled her to start building an audience. And she's hardly anti-phone. 'I love being on my phone,' she says. 'I literally was born in the right generation. But when it comes to constantly looking at images of myself, that's my business card or my portfolio — it's not actually me, the human being.' In January, she deleted TikTok during the brief outage related to President Trump's ban of the app. 'Then, of course, it came back right away, but I couldn't re-download it. So for a month I didn't have TikTok. As it turns out, I was fine.' Arguably better? 'Probably, yeah. I'm back on it now, obviously, because I have to do promo. At first I thought it was the loudest, most overstimulating thing in the world — I couldn't believe I used it. Then after a week, I was like, oh yeah, no, I'm reacclimated.'
Scoop
07-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Scoop
UK Post-Punks SHAME Announce New Album Cutthroat
Shame have announced their return with new album Cutthroat, out 5th September 2025 via Dead Oceans, and have shared the thrilling new video for the album's title track, directed by, featuring the band performing within a motorcycle wall of death. Cutthroat is Shame at their blistering best; an unapologetic new album made with Grammy winning producer John Congleton at the helm. 'It's about the cowards, the cunts, the hypocrites,' says vocalist Charlie Steen. 'Let's face it, there's a lot of them around right now.' Still in their twenties and having proved themselves several times over via legendary live shows and three critically-acclaimed albums, the five childhood friends - Charlie Steen, guitarists Sean Coyle-Smith and Eddie Green, bassist Josh Finerty and drummer Charlie Forbes - went into Cutthroat ready to create a new Ground Zero. 'This is about who we are,' says Steen. 'Our live shows aren't performance art - they're direct, confrontational and raw. That's always been the root of us. We live in crazy times. But it's not about 'Poor me.' It's about 'Fuck you'.' Crucial to this incendiary new outlook was producer John Congleton (St. Vincent, Angel Olsen). From their initial meeting, Congleton's no-bullshit approach became a guiding force to streamline the band's ideas. Stamped throughout with Shame's trademark sense of humour, the album takes on the big issues of today and gleefully toys with them. With Trump in the Whitehouse and Shame holed up in Salvation Studios in Brighton, they cast a merciless eye on themes of conflict and corruption; hunger and desire; lust, envy and the omnipresent shadow of cowardice. Musically, too, the record plays with visceral new ideas. Making electronic music on tour for fun, Coyle-Smith had previously seen the loops he was crafting as a separate entity to the things he wrote for Shame. Then, he realised, maybe they didn't have to be. 'This time, anything could go if it sounded good and you got it right,' he says. Cutthroat's first single and title track takes this idea and runs with it into, quite possibly, the best song Shame have ever laid to tape. It's a ball of barely-contained attitude packed into three minutes of indie dancefloor hedonism. It also masterfully introduces the lyrical outlook of the record: one where cocksure arrogance and deep insecurity are two sides of the same coin. 'I was reading a lot of Oscar Wilde plays where everything was about paradox,' Steen explains. 'In 'Cutthroat', it's that whole idea from Lady Windermere's Fan, 'Life's far too important to be taken seriously'.' This cheeky self-awareness, too, is important. As much as Shame want to burst the bubbles of bluster and ego, encouraging us to look in the mirror and ask ourselves, 'He who casts the first stone…', they also understand that, at its heart, life is often ridiculous. The result is an album that revels in the idiosyncrasies of life, raising an eyebrow and asking the ugly questions that so often get tactfully brushed over. But the one answer that Cutthroat gives with a resounding flourish is that, right now, Shame have never sounded better.
