The Handsome Family got a boost last year when Phoebe Bridgers turned in a bleak cover of their already wrenching Christmas-adjacent song “So Much Wine.” It was a nice shoutout for the husband-wife duo, yet Brett and Rennie Sparks have been making harrowing music together for 30 years. Their power remains in full effect on their latest, Hollow.
Whitney Walker, a singer/songwriter out of Portland, Maine, knows a thing or two about darkness—and hopes that singing about his own can offer a bit of light. His new album, A Dog Staring Into a Mirror on the Floor, reflects that in its name.
Listen to an exclusive preview of A Dog Staring Into a Mirror on the Floor at Paste Magazine.
It can be tough to keep track of all the new music coming out in 2023. Impossible, really. But we can certainly try to cover the ones that stand out.
Daisy Jones & The Six: Aurora
Ella Vos: Superglue
Elvis Costello: The Songs of Bacharach & Costello
Fake Names: Expendables
Kate NV: Wow
Macklemore: Ben
Ron Gallo: Foreground Music
slowthai: Ugly
Tanukichan: GIZMO
The Minks: Creatures of Culture
Whitney Walker: A Dog Staring Into a Mirror
Xiu Xiu: Ignore Grief
Atlanta-based indie rockers Quiet Hounds are gearing up to release their sixth record, Everything Else is Noise, on Oct. 11. In a single-day recording session circa summer 2018, the quartet drafted about a dozen ideas that eventually became the bones of Everything Else is Noise over the course of the next year. The forthcoming EP trades the low-tempo tones of 2017’s Characteristics of Living Things for more pop-forward sounds and introspective lyrics.
The latest single, “Antioch,” which leans a little more indie-folk, was the “catalyst for the record as a whole,” according to frontman Eric Toledo. He also cited Michael Stipe as a strong influence, linking “Antioch” to R.E.M.’s “Losing My Religion.” The song uses the ancient Greek city of Antioch, aka the “cradle of Christianity” that eventually receded into ruin as a result of war and natural disasters, as a symbol of loss.
