CINDY LEE • Freak Heat Waves • Yalcy Mailliw

Cindy Lee – Patrick F of Women & Veritas – Cindy Lee is a Durham, North Carolina-based songwriter, performer, and recording artist known worldwide as one of the last great torch singers and as a living guitar legend. A transient drag queen and dangerous drifter hellbent on corrupting the youth of America. They have sold out of every album they’ve ever made, each record a bold landmark in the history of pop music.

A. SAVAGE • Mali Velasquez

FFO: Parquet Courts, Wiccans, Teenage Cool Kids and Fergus & Geronimo”I imagine myself playing these songs in a small club that is slowly burning,” says A. Savage of his second solo record, Several Songs about Fire. Born in 1986 in Denton, Texas and raised around the newspaper where his parents both worked, by 2012 A. Savage became a headline of his own as the co-frontman of Parquet Courts. After more than a decade in New York, Savage has left the city and the United States, marking his exit with a masterpiece of maturity and a worthy corollary to his first solo venture, 2017’s Thawing Dawn.  “Fire is something you have to escape from, and in a way this album is about escaping from something. This album is a burning building, and these songs are things I’d leave behind to save myself.”

bar italia (UK) • Great Area (UK)

bar italia, the London trio of Nina Cristante, Jezmi Tarik Fehmi and Sam Fenton, have announced details of their new album ‘Tracey Denim’, which will be released digitally and on CD May 19th on Matador. The album will be available on vinyl September 8. ‘Tracey Denim’ was recorded and produced by bar italia with mixing from Marta Salogni. It features the single “Nurse!” which was released in March to acclaim, and described as “a hypnotic post-punk ballad” (The Guardian) and “narcotically arresting” (Pitchfork). Over the last two years, bar italia have released two albums, an EP and several singles on Dean Blunt’s World Music label, leading to much word-of-mouth, sold out headline shows, and festival performances at Pitchfork Music Festival London, by:Larm, OUT.FEST, Le Guess Who?, and End Of The Road.

SUPERCRUSH • On Being An Angel • Mesh Heads

Although best known for playing in a long lineage of hardcore, punk, and metal groups, SUPERCRUSH’s Mark Palm’s focus has always been song-craft and pop sensibility. After beginning to explore softer sounds in the late aughts as a member of San Francisco shoegazers Modern Charms, Palm adopted the Supercrush moniker as a vehicle for his pursuit of powerpop preeminence.

The RED PEARS • Mexican Slum Rats • 60 Juno

Hailing from El Monte, a sleepy suburban town just east of Los Angeles, The Red Pears’ founding members, Henry Vargas (vocals/guitar) and Jose Corona (drums), draw their sound from the spectrum between the early 2000s New York indie rock and grunge scene to the cumbia and corridos that soundtracked their childhoods. After cycling through an assortment of lineups, mutual friend and bassist Patrick Juarez stayed on and expanded their operation. Now a solid three-piece band, the emerging alt-rockers have come a long way from meeting at a local Battle of the Bands, practicing in their garages, and naming themselves after their favorite color and a pun on the word “pair”— a subtle nod to sonic inspirations The White Stripes and The Black Keys.

HIGH VIS (UK) • Sculpture Club • URN

Though the band were all alumni of some of the UK hardcore scene’s most celebrated groups, High Vis’s 2019 debut, No Sense No Feeling, was a record that opened its viewfinder beyond the parameters of any genre or scene. Sure, the intensity and passion of hardcore were stoking the fires, but in its intense post-punk inspired textures and moods lay a sonic adventurousness which suggested the members of High Vis were never going to be confined by any notion of what they should or shouldn’t be playing.