News

Ow! Summer 2019 won't be the summer that wuz without a blast from Dead Rider! Once the smoke clears, you'll be burning HOT down the avenue with the deal of a lifetime: a new single straight off the lot, "The Sale"! Dead Rider's  industrial-strength deviant blues-funk is boiled down to a single-dose transmission: tolerable toxicity, with variable-speed beats and raps pushing golden age automaton U-S-A-isms (with a swirl of acrid bitterness for taste, of course) - a... (read more)

More than 50 years since he wrote his first country hit, Chris Gantry lives and sings today like the raw outlaw he was back then, just with a wiser world view that only comes with great - and sometimes not-so-great - life experience. While many of his contemporaries have been lost to the years, Chris continues to write and perform with grizzled purpose and ferver, as the song-stories found on his forthcoming Nashlantis album testify! Nashlantis is a country-folk séance of the human spirit; at... (read more)

With molten fingers working across a wooden fret board, Bill MacKay has all the sparkling you need to ignite your deepest summer fantasies! See, the freshly released and aptly named Fountain Fire has made waves with all the heads out there, and Bill's doing his damnedest to shoot the curl right into your ear-hole - both on record and totally live! Yes, MacKay's coming for you with all the hottest six-stringed, in-the-flesh action residents of the Midwest and East Coast can possibly handle... (read more)

"Every song that's nevermore sung/will sound again upon the Evernew Tongue"

Whether we understand the reference in the line, it sums up Alasdair Roberts' approach as a singer and songwriter, now halfway through its third decade. Down the years, he has devoted himself to the history of traditional songs, playing them forward into our ever-evolving world as their meanings continue to evolve within him. Whether singing the auld songs, using inspiration from a line of text, or taking a time-honoured air as as... (read more)

Ty Segall presents “Radio,” a new single from his forthcoming album, First Taste, due August 2nd. Just in time for the July 4th festivities (such as they are), “Radio” should satisfy all our barely-subsumed bloodlust and immutable desire to rule while also providing a majestically boomboxable anthem to revel along with at the cookout. 

As “Taste,” a number that “churns like a buzzsaw without forfeiting any melody” (Rolling Stone), continues to rise at radio, new single “Radio” sizzles with koto by... (read more)

The Purple Mountains train rolls on through its desolate American landscape, equal parts joy and resignation. The voice, former Silver Jew David Berman, is returned from the hinterland, ten years after turning off the tap to his string of indie-jukebox classics  - and his findings, he warns us, are candid. Not only is his heart heavy with trepidation, but the world around him seems to be lacking. The only respite for our singer is to bury himself in the garish surroundings that make up... (read more)

The Silence has descended upon us once again! In the two years-plus since their previous album, Nine Suns, One Morning, their leader Masaki Batoh recorded and released his solo album, Nowhere - but from the first chimes of hazy guitar arpeggios that open Metaphysical Feedback, we are transported right back to the unique rock and roll space that The Silence conjure whenever they plug in and come together. As with their previous three albums, The Silence use the sound of analog recording as... (read more)

Drag City Press - the final frontier! Or so we thought back in the year 2000 (whotta coincidence) when we put out John Fahey's How Bluegrass Music Destroyed My Life. For a record label like ours, releasing books somehow implied the big time - and so we continued to search for projects that we could get behind and continued to find goods ones that now fill our catalog - or as we like to call it, "library." Now it's 2019, and we're still... (read more)

"Wasted" is a reflection of Nashville legend Chris Gantry's long and winding path through this world - but the vitality of the songwriting stops the music from becoming simple elegy or denouement. Chris' crafty old-school way with a tune and his smooth melodicism gives him the space to tell his tales with ease; lovers, losers and madmen are depicted with warmth and empathy, a genuine love of the human spirit and the singing chops of a man who's known tens of thousands of... (read more)