Album premiere: Nude With Lyre, Blood

Augusta, Georgia producer Tristan McNeil recently described his music to The Fader as “dirty south drone.” Ambient sound design inspired by time spent working bad food service jobs in a bleak hometown: “monotony and the crude surfaces of things… pores of skin, grease in food, crackle of bad speakers.” Initially his debut Blood was intended to soundtrack a short film. When that project halted unexpectedly, he continued on for two years, pushing the compositions further while looking more inward. The resulting album now mirrors his own experiences sifting through the distortion—dirt, exhaust, humidity—to find the sublime. 

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Album premiere: Redspencer, Perks

Melbourne’s Redspencer craft exceptionally warm and sprawling guitar pop. After releasing a well-recieved EP in 2015, the four-piece entered a makeshift suburban studio to record Perks, their full-length debut. “Jazzy, harmony-filled, effervescent, gorgeous” are a few descriptors from BrooklynVegan, who liken Redspencer to Trashcan Sinatras. The band also cite influences Yo La Tengo and Rodriguez, and perfected their analog sound with producer David M. Turner and mastering engineer Josh Bonati (Mac DeMarco, DIIV, Wild Nothing). Lyrically, the record muses on both the existential and the mundane, making for a listen that’s just as insightful as it is pleasant. 

Album premiere: Alex Izenberg, Harlequin

Alex Izenberg’s debut LP comes to light after more than five years recording under a variety of pseudonyms. The reclusive Los Angeles-based songwriter has a knack for melody, able to twist notions of romance, fantasy and mischief into charming, off-kilter pop music. Across Harlequin—a collection first written to an old Yamaha piano, then arranged with the help of friend Ari Balouzian, and mixed by Chet “JR” White (Girls, Tobias Jesso Jr.)—Izenberg deploys strings, horns, and found sound to confront love and loss. The result is an altered reality of a record indebted to past eras of baroque psychedelia and suggestive of some other timeless, fever-dreamt one altogether.

Album premiere: DIANA, Familiar Touch

In 2012, the success of DIANA’s first single—which drew comparisons to the soft-focus pop of Roxy Music and Cocteau Twins—came as a surprise. Initially a one-off project, the Toronto-based trio quickly recorded more. Within a year they were touring internationally, remixed by Four Tet, and longlisted for Canada’s prestigious Polaris Music Prize. Ahead of Familiar Touch, their eagerly-anticipated sophomore LP, the band took extended time to reflect and consider what’s next, eventually finding their way over sessions at a rented cottage in rural Québec. “Well worth the wait,” says THUMP, who note the album’s more rhythmically driven sound. This from newfound inspiration: early ‘90s dance music and the rich, ambitious studio production that defined in the '70s and '80s.