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Helsinki Surf City - Mary Ann Hawkins' second album out in February 2025

Finnish surf rock sultans Mary Ann Hawkins are back with another wave hitting the shores around the world next February. Riding the mighty new wave of Finnish Surf Rock, Mary Ann Hawkins are the No. 1 surfing group in the country. Equally comfortable surfing the arid spaghetti western desert as well as the thousand lakes of Finland, these sweaty but impeccably dressed young men present you with twelve tunes just right for surf-dancing.

For many moons now the Helsinki-based quintet has driven audiences wild across the old continent, especially in their native land of Finland. Having self-released two EP records and the debut self titled album in 2022 via Svart Records, the group are now preparing for the release of their sophomore album Helsinki Surf City in February 2025. With the new album the band has added their twist to their instrumental, dynamic surf sound they are known for by adding renowned Finnish vocalists to feature on some of the tracks. Stepa, Marko Haavisto, Maria Stereo and Minja Koski known as M add the cherries on top of the whitecaps making this album a joyous, beautiful, dangerous, action-packed and even a bit of a frightening trip. Ride the big one, ride the Helsinki Surf City!

Helsinki Surf City - Mary Ann Hawkins' second album out in February 2025

Finnish surf rock sultans Mary Ann Hawkins are back with another wave hitting the shores around the world next February. Riding the mighty new wave of Finnish Surf Rock, Mary Ann Hawkins are the No. 1 surfing group in the country. Equally comfortable surfing the arid spaghetti western desert as well as the thousand lakes of Finland, these sweaty but impeccably dressed young men present you with twelve tunes just right for surf-dancing.

For many moons now the Helsinki-based quintet has driven audiences wild across the old continent, especially in their native land of Finland. Having self-released two EP records and the debut self titled album in 2022 via Svart Records, the group are now preparing for the release of their sophomore album Helsinki Surf City in February 2025. With the new album the band has added their twist to their instrumental, dynamic surf sound they are known for by adding renowned Finnish vocalists to feature on some of the tracks. Stepa, Marko Haavisto, Maria Stereo and Minja Koski known as M add the cherries on top of the whitecaps making this album a joyous, beautiful, dangerous, action-packed and even a bit of a frightening trip. Ride the big one, ride the Helsinki Surf City!

Darla Records is happy to offer a 20th anniversary deluxe, expanded edition of The Tennessee Fire, the debut album by My Morning Jacket with 16 previously unreleased bonus tracks selected from the archives by Jim James. In February, 1999, Darla Records received a charming Valentine's Day love letter with artwork and 4-track cassette tape demo in the mail from Jim James with the very first My Morning Jacket recordings. Early one Sunday morning, I popped the tape in and fell instantly in love. I could not find the accompanying letter with contact info! Chandra soon found it after I raved at her that she must get out of bed come hear what I was hearing. I called Jim and we began to plan the work. Weeks later, after we'd established a track list, including four songs re-recorded in a real studio, and had artwork together for a debut album, I thought to myself, "I really love this. There's nothing like it in the marketplace. I hope it can sell 1500." And the rest is history. - Mr. Darla Limited edition red vinyl 3xLP in triple gatefold with 16 previously unreleased bonus tracks. Clearwater Blue Vinyl.

The Hebrew surf-grunger returns!End of Teenage captures CharlieMegira's Berlin years with the BetShe'an Valley Hillbillies, shortlybefore his death. A time-traveling,five-song murder mystery guitaralbum that owes as much to DickDale as it does David Lynch. Thisexpanded 10 year anniversary editionalso includes the 11-song demo, whereMegira's familiar themes of drive-innmelancholia, beach blanket bongos,and desert drifting are explored inthe privacy of his bedroom. Let himwhisper in your ear.

Banana Vinyl.The Hebrew surf-grunger returns!End of Teenage captures CharlieMegira's Berlin years with the BetShe'an Valley Hillbillies, shortlybefore his death. A time-traveling,five-song murder mystery guitaralbum that owes as much to DickDale as it does David Lynch. Thisexpanded 10 year anniversary editionalso includes the 11-song demo, whereMegira's familiar themes of drive-innmelancholia, beach blanket bongos,and desert drifting are explored inthe privacy of his bedroom. Let himwhisper in your ear.

“Do you still believe it?” John Ross asks that question after journeying through the wreckage. The genesis of Dulling The Horns goes back to late 2022, when Ross began workshopping new material during soundcheck on the ILYSM tour. Last summer, Wild Pink decamped to western Massachusetts to reunite with engineer Justin Pizzoferrato. Ross decided to record Dulling The Horns live in the room, in an effort to capture Wild Pink’s onstage style — rawer, grainier. Gone are the glimmering atmospherics and studio affectations of recent Wild Pink outings. Instead, Ross’ voice is haggard against the humid distortion coating every song. “I wanted to make economical songs,” Ross explains. “Music that is very much at its core three or four people rocking.” If before, Wild Pink took notes from Springsteen and Petty, they’ve now entered their Crazy Horse era. On Dulling The Horns, you can hear him rediscovering the fire in real time. Tropes discarded along the roadside, songs pulled from the formative DNA of rock music, all filtered through years of messy fog. “There is no answer to these problems,” Ross says, having eventually yielded. But as far Dulling The Horns is concerned, there’s at least one path forward: Burn it all away, and keep moving. The album was mixed by Alex Farrar in Asheville NC, mastered by Greg Obis in Chicago, IL and is out in October on Fire Talk.

“Do you still believe it?” John Ross asks that question after journeying through the wreckage. The genesis of Dulling The Horns goes back to late 2022, when Ross began workshopping new material during soundcheck on the ILYSM tour. Last summer, Wild Pink decamped to western Massachusetts to reunite with engineer Justin Pizzoferrato. Ross decided to record Dulling The Horns live in the room, in an effort to capture Wild Pink’s onstage style — rawer, grainier. Gone are the glimmering atmospherics and studio affectations of recent Wild Pink outings. Instead, Ross’ voice is haggard against the humid distortion coating every song. “I wanted to make economical songs,” Ross explains. “Music that is very much at its core three or four people rocking.” If before, Wild Pink took notes from Springsteen and Petty, they’ve now entered their Crazy Horse era. On Dulling The Horns, you can hear him rediscovering the fire in real time. Tropes discarded along the roadside, songs pulled from the formative DNA of rock music, all filtered through years of messy fog. “There is no answer to these problems,” Ross says, having eventually yielded. But as far Dulling The Horns is concerned, there’s at least one path forward: Burn it all away, and keep moving. The album was mixed by Alex Farrar in Asheville NC, mastered by Greg Obis in Chicago, IL and is out in October on Fire Talk.

Quinnisa Kinsella-Mulkerin recorded her first song at five years old with her parents, who comprise the adventurous Maine band, Big Blood. Ever since the age of five, she was writing songs, banging on chimes, strumming guitars, and clanging together whatever else she could find. Improvisation was natural, and she stuck to the approach. Kinsella-Mulkerin brings this innate sense of songwriting to The Wickies, a duo she formed with Aiden Arel a year ago at age 16, whose chill approach and fluid delivery belie true inventiveness in the underneath mechanics.

Inspired by seventies folk icons like Stevie Nicks, Krautrock bands like Can, and modern indie-rockers like Alex G, The Wickies feel like an amalgamation of these decade-spanning sounds, but uniquely their own. Kinsella-Mulkerin’s voice croons like a seventies folk star, but it possesses a great and controlled tone. Her vocals feel like another instrument within the mix, building and growing each song to its fullest sound, leaving no detail within the mix unheard. Their use of echoing guitar lines recalls sixties psych, a springboard for their unique take.

Kinsella-Mulkerin’s lush, free-flowing lyrics, created on the spot, complement Arel’s fleshed out backing instrumentation and over-dubbing. Quickly, the pair created more material than they ever needed, allowing them to mold their recordings into a self-titled debut album. Like a painter crafting the perfect exhibition of their finest work, Arel and Kinsella-Mulkerin condensed their improvisations to all the best parts. Tracks like “Campfire Song” and “Skipping Pond” exemplify the ethereal and lackadaisical atmosphere of their sound. “I keep finding these weird, obscure bands from the seventies that have one album and nothing else, which is awesome,” Kinsella-Mulkerin says, “I want my music to sound like somebody found it in a record store that no one has ever heard of and uploaded it to YouTube. I want it to sound a little strange.”

Fables of the future fuel the present. Lisel (Eliza Bagg) draws from this tradition on The Vanishing Point, a daring musical odyssey of altered singing, experimental pop, broken melodies, and striking electronics. A culmination of her continual dissemblance of genre, Lisel’s new album is an epic composed of allegorical tales, forming a dystopian storybook of life in the shadow of impending catastrophe. It’s a high-concept work of contemporary pop sounds, hyperpop motifs and tropes. Every song reflects the shared psycho-emotional experience of moving towards unsettling futures and looking beyond these outcomes, to the point where the horizons vanish.

Evolving the sonic toolkit she employed on Patterns For Auto-tuned Voices And Delay (2023), Lisel transforms pop into a canvas for operatic storytelling. Along with making her own work, Bagg is a classical singer working in baroque and contemporary experimental opera, and with her project Lisel, she seeks to develop new, expressive qualities out of ancient vocal techniques from the Baroque and Renaissance periods. Her opera experience has infused her with a desire for a big, cinematic sound and holistic world-building, creating a “total artwork,” and she fits that medium into the form of a solo project. From haunting whispers to soaring melodies, she reaches back towards ancient musical traditions while incorporating futuristic sounds in order to imagine how a possible future might look back at contemporary existence.

Dystopic stories melt into pop songs, hammered to ruin. Both through sonics and lyrics, the album recounts urgent narratives as ancient mythological fables, chronicling in operatic density the deepening awareness of the world’s looming, inevitable vanishing point.

Photographer Carla Rossi further builds Lisel’s world through a series of photographs that similarly draw on Renaissance and Medieval painting, while placing them aesthetically in a digital realm. In these dramatic, hyper-stylized photos, Lisel takes up classical poses and yields iconographic symbols, further exploring the dissonance in her work as these manufactured “paintings” recall storytelling of the past while depicting images from an imagined future.

Robert Sotelo is a bedroom pop songsmith who lives in Glasgow. Sotelo has released six albums since 2017, three of which came out on Upset The Rhythm. He also performs in Order of the Toad, Dancer and Nightshift. Mary Currie is best known as half of touchstone DIY experimentalists Flaming Tunes, alongside Gareth Williams (of This Heat). Currie also performed in Officer! with Mick Hobbs amongst others.