Lucky Number Music

Palehound’s Ellen Kempner and Jay Som’s Melina Duterte recently announced new collaborative project Bachelor and shared their acclaimed first single “Anything At All”. Now, the duo announce their debut album – Doomin’ Sun due out May 28 – alongside brand new track “Stay in the Car” with a music video directed by Haoyan of America, watch below.

On the bass-heavy rock song, the duo paint a yearning portrait of a woman in a supermarket parking lot, a barely-contained desire oozing out of cotidian descriptions like: “She burns out of the market / Plastic bags digging into wrists / Blood stuck in her fingertips.”

Kempner explains, “I wrote the lyrics to ‘Stay In the Car’ back in December of 2019 when I was in Florida for my partner’s top surgery. I had run out one afternoon, post op, while he was healing to grab lunch for us and as I was gathering my stuff in the parking lot, a big car pulled up and this absolutely beautiful woman got out. She was dressed all in red, dripping with jewelry and had the most wild fiery mane I’d ever seen. She was yelling at the man behind the wheel asking him what he wanted from the store and I wished I was that man. I wanted to be a part of her life, her best friend, her driver, whatever she wanted me to be. I was completely mesmerized.” Duterte continues, “We wanted this song to be a visceral listening experience, inspired by The Pixies and The Breeders”.

Kempner and Duterte hybridized their individual songwriting talents, producing a collection that slips between moods with ease and showcases their lyrical prowess. While the album features collaborations with the likes of Big Thief’s Buck Meek and James Krivchenia, as well as Duterte’s partner Annie Truscott of Chastity Belt, the record was largely made by the two musicians in isolation as a fitting precursor to the forthcoming year. Creating the space to explore significant themes from queerness to climate change, the collection also finds Bachelor experiencing pure, unadulterated joy: the kind of joy that can only come from creating, laughing, and having a ridiculous amount of fun with a close friend.

Written and recorded in Topanga, California over the course of two weeks in January of 2020, pre-pandemic, Doomin’ Sun is a record steeped in friendship. Pre-order it now.

The Sydney-based three-piece Middle Kids (Hannah Joy, Tim Fitz and Harry Day) have released “Today We’re The Greatest”, the cinematic title track from their hotly anticipated second album, out this Friday March 19th 2021.

“Today We’re The Greatest” features a heartachingly beautiful performance from lead singer Hannah Joy and showcases the juxtaposition of her compelling songwriting. The grandiose and romantic notion of the song’s title is offset by the repeated refrain “life is gory and boring sometimes” which both closes the song and also the album – reveling equally in the good, the bad, the beautiful and the ugly.

About the song, Hannah explains:
“This is a simple song of people being TINY and our lives being FLEETING but in that we are EPIC and GREAT. It’s finding the beauty and majesty of the every day. Therein lies life and meaning.

LIFE IS GORY AND BORING SOMETIMES: it’s both hectic and mundane and we have to accept both.”

“Today We’re The Greatest” is accompanied by the stunning music video, watch below, directed by W.A.M. Bleakley and filmed on the Kiama costal path in Australia.

Critically acclaimed, indie-rock powerhouses Jay Som (Melina Duterte) and Palehound (Ellen Kempner) have joined forces to form a new project called Bachelor. Today, they release their debut single “Anything At All”. The two musicians came together in pre-quarantine 2020, recording in California during what was then a rare break from touring. Written, performed, and produced entirely by the pair, the new single starts with a heavy, funky bass line followed by a chorus so playful it could be a schoolyard taunt.

The duo explains, “We’re so excited to finally share this song and announce our new band! We’ve been dear friends and huge fans of each other for years and were lucky enough to get to work together before quarantine in January 2020. One morning Melina was showering and this bass line idea just stuck in her head. She went downstairs to play it, waking Ellen who then came down and joined in on drums and started recording. After we got the basic track down we wrote lyrics about queerness, lust, and longing.Writing and recording “Anything At All” was a really natural process and releasing it now feels very hopeful and joyous to us.”

Stay tuned for more Bachelor news coming soon in 2021!

The Sydney-based three-piece Middle Kids, formed of lead singer and songwriter Hannah Joy, multi-instrumentalist Tim Fitz and drummer, Harry Day, today announce the release of their second album, Today We’re The Greatest, out on March 19th 2021.

Recorded and produced in Los Angeles by Lars Stalfors (St. Vincent, Soccer Mummy, Purity Ring), the follow-up to the band’s award-winning 2018 debut, Lost Friends, is their most personal and courageous effort to date. Moving away from lyrics of a more conceptual nature, Today We’re The Greatest is the open, uninhibited product of fearless collaboration. Showing a real vulnerability, Joy is pulling directly from her own experiences and breaking down barriers she had previously set for herself. About the new record, she said: “I want to make music that loves its listener. Music that makes people feel seen, seen in the tiny little places that hide away in their hearts. I want people to hear our music, and feel a sense of love. And when I say love, it can be challenging, intense and tough. But it’s in the guts.” She added: “It can be easier to live dualistically, splitting the world in two. We want to be able say it’s this or it’s that, but sometimes it’s both — and can we hold both? Can we hold the brokenness? Can we hold the beauty? That has definitely been a defining bit of this album, the fragility in that dance.”

To coincide with the announcement, Middle Kids today share their monumental new single, “Questions”, a charged three-minute odyssey which sees Joy struggle poetically with concepts of honesty and intimacy over an explosive rhythm section and a stunningly orchestrated brass-filled climax. As Joy explains, “Questions” is about the fallacies of intimate relationships; “I used to drink a lot and most of my previous relationships revolved around this. I don’t think I ever really knew them or they me as a result. Questions is about people being around each other but not being close. People who are in intimate relationships can stop asking questions of each other because they are uncomfortable and confusing.” The single is accompanied by a one-take video directed by the band’s cinematic collaborator, W.A.M Bleakley. Watch it below.

“Questions” follows the release of the album’s first single, “R U 4 Me?”, which was the lead track of the week in The Guardian Guide who described it as “a nervy, Strokes-esque floorfiller about flailing around in search of emotional connection that still manages to be a sunny delight.” Other tracks on the album include “Run With You”, written when Joy was a few months into pregnancy with her and Tim Fitz, her husband and bandmate’s, first child. They recorded her 20-week sonogram, and wove the gentle, rapid thump of their baby boy’s beating heart into the last 20 seconds of the track — an exuberant declaration of devotion. Joy’s journey to motherhood and her marriage with Fitz has imbued her songs with a vibrancy that’s unabashedly romantic yet free of clichés. “Stacking Chairs,” with its unique allegories and Joy’s sunny vocals, strikes this delicate balance beautifully: it’s a testament to her deep connection with Fitz and the new, “infinitesimal” love that transformed their lives with their son’s arrival.

Today We’re The Greatest follows the release of Middle Kids’ critically acclaimed 2018 debut, Lost Friends, which was awarded Album of the Year by Triple J Radio and was also nominated for Best Rock Album at the ARIA Awards. The record also earned them support slots with the likes of Bloc Party, War on Drugs and Cold War Kids as well as several US TV show performances including Conan, Jimmy Kimmel and The Late, Late Show with James Corden.

Following their Top 20 charting second album So When You Gonna…, Dream Wife (Alice Go, Bella Podpadec and Rakel Mjöll) today announce the release of a live album, IRL (Live in London 2020), and share the previously unreleased “Cheap Thrills“.

Fortuitously recorded by their front of house engineer at London’s Peckham Audio this past January, it documents what was expected to be the band’s first of many shows of 2020. Featuring highlights from both of their albums, plus Cheap Thrills, the recording has undoubtedly captured a blistering performance that showcases the trio’s trademark ferocity.

Dream Wife say that: “The rock show is the beating heart of this band. We cut our teeth as a unit playing relentless DIY tours before ever releasing music. We often describe recordings as a snapshot of a song at a moment in time, but understanding them as living, breathing, transforming entities through the rock show. Kicking off this year we imagined 2020 to be seriously getting back to touring, to playing shows, to letting these songs live. But… 2020 has not been what anyone expected it to be. 
 
When we put on this small intimate ‘sort of’ secret gig for fans & friends at Peckham Audio back in January we thought it was the first but, as it turns out, it was going to be the only for a very long time. We truly believe in the transcendental power of live music; that you have the power to go somewhere together. We can’t wait to commune with you IRL, at the rock show; to share sweat and joy and rage and grief and energy and love. But for now, we offer you a snapshot of our only rock show of 2020. We offer you a little bit of that energy and rawness and connection captured digitally. It’s not quite the same. But don’t worry we’ll be together, we will be loud, and we will be unapologetically present soon. Lots of love, Your Wives xxx”

Also announced today, the bands explosive second album So When You Gonna… has earned a Top 10 spot in Rough Trade’s Albums of the Year List. Produced and mixed by Marta Salogni, the album deals with topics such as miscarriage and gender equality, and followed the band’s 2018 critically acclaimed self-titled release. The record debuted in the UK Album Chart at # 18, the only album in the top 20 that week to be produced by a womxn and non-male engineering team, as well as the only non-major label release, and at #1 in the Official Record Store Chart of Independent Retailers.