Holy Fawn
Arizona quartet HOLY FAWN bring an amalgamation of blackened-shoegaze and atmospheric post-metal; imbued with their somber textures, crushing wall of sound, and haunting imagery of nature and dream-like states, HOLY FAWN has made waves touring alongside bands like Thrice, Deafheaven, Rolo Tomassi, across North America and Europe.
Florist
On Jellywish Florist invite listeners to question everything — to imagine a world where magic, surrealism, and the supernatural are our companions in day-to-day life. It dares to present a realm of possibility and imagination in a time that feels evermore prescriptive, limiting, and awful. The album finds Florist exploring life’s big questions without offering silver linings, morals, or definitive answers. Instead, the band asks perhaps the most difficult of questions: Is it possible to break free from our ingrained thought cycles and pedestrian way of life? That, Florist posits, may be the only way to be truly happy, fulfilled, and free. Singer, guitarist, and principal songwriter Emily Sprague says that the record is purposely complicated. “It’s a gentle delivery of something that is really chaotic, confusing, and multifaceted,” she explains. “It has this technicolor that’s inspired by our world and also fantasy elements that we can use to escape our world.” “We enter an observational fever dream about floating through liminal space between lifetimes, individual perceptions. There is reflection on our connectedness in joy and suffering through the wish for a peaceful place for our spirits to live and land,” Sprague explains. “‘Have Heaven’ establishes the world of the album to be not quite always lucid, but rather a perspective that is blended into the worlds of the magic and death realms swirling around us. The chorus is a chant that pleads for a better symbiosis between these worlds, and between our earthly forms trying to survive alongside each other, bound to the systems we must exist within.” Jellywish is an exercise in multidimensional world building. The album’s panoramic cover art, which looks like something out of a Henry Darger volume, wraps the music in a collage of color that presents as science fiction-adjacent, hinting at something mysterious, fantastical, and mythological. Inside the album’s jacket, however, are tender and catchy sonic meditations on life’s most knotty subjects: life, death, earth, reality, relationships, joy, and pain. Taken together, Florist offers an acute sense of the band at this moment, one that worries about the world and its place in it. In contrast, it also presents an alternative to the doldrums of day-to-day life, and the necessary suggestion that very different things may be true at the same time. With Jellywish, Florist offers a complex album in a time that is anything but simple. In mining the chaos and wonder of physical and spiritual worlds, the band holds a mirror to itself to the great benefit of all. It tells us that we are not alone, and challenges us to believe in magic.
Worry Club
Worry Club is the moniker of Chicago-based indie musician Chase Walsh. Walsh integrates dreamy synth-pop guitar and muted percussion into gritty and unflinching lyricism. He looks depression and heartbreak dead in the face with his poetry, packaging these difficult subjects into truly gorgeous songs.
The Criticals
The Criticals are a Nashville based rock band formed by Parker Forbes and Cole Shugart. The Criticals have proven themselves a powerful and fierce duo — one with both a diverse musical appetite in songwriting and a whiplash live show that’s drawn sellout crowds in major US markets including New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago. The band recently released their highly regarded EP Front Door Confrontations and continued a steady diet of raucous live shows across the country. The band are now set to release a handful of singles leading up to their debut album release on Fantasy Records in 2025.
Enjoy x Puzzle
ENJOY Born and raised in Orange, California, Wyatt Shears is an artist who is best known for his song writing and aesthetic vision. Taking influence from a wide variety of genres including so-cal and UK punk , 70’s funk and drum and bass , Wyatt has helped to establish a sound that is very recognizable internationally and that has become an important staple for southern California. Establishing enjoy in 2010 and the garden soon after in 2011, both projects developed a style and vision of their own and continue to be cornerstones of California based collective vada vada. PUZZLE Puzzle is a solo endeavor created by Fletcher Shears in 2012. With 20+ albums under his belt he has garnered a slow but steady amount of growth and attention while putting the majority of his focus into his other project; The Garden. Through the years he has done a very select amount of touring and playing live but has managed to tour in the U.S., Japan & Mexico. In the last 6-7 years his music has garnered attention at a more rapid pace and he has now begun to play more often. During live shows, Puzzle is known for having an energetic and sometimes aggressive stage presence. Similar to with The Garden, the Puzzle live shows often teeter between unpredictable and bombastic to more melodic and stripped back. His most recent full length album, “The Rotten Opera” is available everywhere now.
Kevin McClure
The Faint – SOLD OUT
Save Ferris
Formed in 1995, Save Ferris remains one of the seminal and most beloved bands from the third wave of ska. The group’s Orange County home was fertile ground for a thriving music scene, with punk, rock, and ska emerging from the region. Save Ferris blended the best elements of these sounds to help bring the region’s sound to the world. The group’s humble beginnings saw them play house parties and local venues, powered by Monique Powell’s high-octane vocals. Save Ferris’ live show instantly became a hit. As the word spread, the band got a much-needed boost. Legendary KROQ DJ Rodney Bingenheimer got a hold of the band’s self-released album. He played their cover of Dexys Midnight Runners “Come on Eileen” on his Rodney on the ROQ show and the response was overwhelming. Soon thereafter, Kevin Weatherly picked up the song and it was added to the legendary taste-making rock station’s rotation. All of this happened independently without a record label and with Powell serving as the singer and band manager. Major labels started noticing the buzz that was emanating from Orange County. In 1996, the band won a Grammy showcase award for best unsigned band, and with Epic Records’ David Massey as one of the judges, Save Ferris would sign with the label. Epic re-released the Introducing Save Ferris EP and, in 1997, Save Ferris unleashed their debut album, It Means Everything. Save Ferris toured the world for the better part of the next six years, with 1999’s Modified released during that time. In 2003, the band went on a hiatus. Starting in 2004, Powell switched gears and used her vocal talents to become a go-to studio musician. She appeared on albums for The Used, Goldfinger, Foxy Shazam, Lost Prophets, Mest, and Hilary Duff, among many others. Slowly, however, Powell started having health issues. In 2015, after years of painful back issues, she underwent a risky procedure to fix her broken neck that could have damaged her greatest musical weapon: her vocal cords. Ahead of the procedure, Powell made a promise to her father, who had been begging her to return to the stage: if the surgery was successful, she’d bring back Save Ferris. And it was a success. That year, Powell, with a new cast of characters, reformed Save Ferris. The hype surrounding the band was massive. After months of rehabilitation, Powell brought Save Ferris home to Orange County where it played a sold-out show at the Pacific Amphitheater in Costa Mesa. Another giant show at the Santa Monica Pier, with over 20,000 people in attendance, was put out on vinyl. These raucous shows proved that the band wasn’t just back, but ready to roar. Through a crowdfunded campaign in 2016, Powell and her bandmates went into the studio to record a new EP. Titled Checkered Past, the collection was released the following year, and produced by John Avila of Oingo Boingo. The EP featured an appearance by Neville Staple of The Specials, one of Powell’s favorite artists. Following Checkered Past’s release, Save Ferris played the entire 2017 Warped Tour on the main stage, headlined shows, and played festivals across the world. The future is as bright as it has been for Save Ferris in a long time. Powell scrapped a record she wrote prior to the pandemic and is currently at work on the first new Save Ferris album in nearly two decades. The band recently packed the House of Blues in Anaheim, playing in front of fans of all ages. Powell is the centerpiece of the action. Her dazzling on- stage presence continues to wow audiences and the band’s energy is infectious. Save Ferris are out to prove that they’re no nostalgia act, with their best days still ahead of them.
Sarah Kinsley
New York’s Sarah Kinsley is fascinated by creating imaginary worlds and alternate realities. She tries to conjure these with her music, but it requires the unlocking of one’s imagination to really go there. Sarah encourages you to try it though. We all need an escape. Born in California, and raised in Connecticut and Singapore before returning to New York to attend Columbia University, this perfectly unusual leftfield pop singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist (Sarah plays the piano, synth, guitar, ondes Martenot, glass bowls, and some violin on her recent debut album Escaper) studied music and was creating much positive noise and conversation online long before she had signed a record deal. Everything she was putting out was home-spun; selfproduced, self-written and self-performed. Sarah made a habit of documenting her process, and it was one such video, uploaded in response to the misconception that “Women don’t produce music” that documented Sarah recording the sounds of tapping on a desk, opening a door, switching on a light, thumping on a mattress and flicking a wine glass, splicing them all together and forming the introduction to a prior EP track, Over + Under, that captured the imagination of a young audience who have been feverishly following her every move since. Sarah grew up in the world of classical music, studying the likes of Chopin, Debussy, and Ravel. She started out behind the piano before playing violin in the perfectionas-necessity world of orchestra. Meanwhile, this disciplined student of music was a teenager falling in love with the exciting, “unsubstantial” pop music that dominated Top 200 radio. Debut LP Escaper in some ways marries many of those unlikely contexts—substantial pop that flowers with lush string arrangements. “I’m just such a sucker for massive, grand songs,” she says. “I think it’s the classical musician in me who loves symphonies and the magnum opus effect.” Named one of Vevo’s Artists to Watch in 2024, Sarah has met sold out audiences singing her songs in unison right across the US and Europe. There’s something very communal about the experiences that Sarah and her band manage to evoke. The young crowd is feverish, greeting each song like an old hit, and forgetting themselves for some time in her company, allowing Sarah to massage their imaginations. Support tours, headline tours, and early festival appearances – it’s as exciting to her fans in the UK and Europe as it is to those in the US. They’re turning up in their droves and traveling miles and miles (and miles) to see her.
BabyJake
Florida-born Jake Herring, known professionally as BabyJake, may have appeared to be an overnight success, but his journey to the spotlight was anything but instantaneous. His hit single Cigarettes on Patios took off in 2019, garnering 200M+ streams and earning him a certified gold record and a major label deal. He would release two albums from the same vine, until the upheaval of the pandemic saw him splitting with his label and at a pivotal turning point. But giving up was never an option for Jake, and his resilience set him on a new path: an ascetic journey to rediscover himself, shedding his shag haircut in favor of a buzzcut, naked skin marked by the tattoos he collected along his journey. He found the answer on his latest album Beautiful Blue Collar Boy, a bouquet of songs rooted in the beauties and hardships of day to day life. Drawing influence from the likes of Bob Dylan, Tom Petty, and Jeff Tweedy, BabyJake stays true to his north star of confident storytelling and songwriting. On Beautiful Blue Collar Boy, Jake trades in the late night parties for the simplicity of authenticity, hard work, and a meaningful life to come home to. This chapter of BabyJake reveals a man stripped down to his American roots, with each song painting a small vignette of BabyJake’s blue collar dreams. Now planted in Nashville, TN, Jake returns to us as a Beautiful Blue Collar Boy.