Today, the Chicago-based project Babe Report shared their third and final single off their debut album Did You Get Better out on May 31 through Exploding In Sound. The album's weighty centerpiece is defined by its soaring guitar lead and muffled, murky vocals. What might have begun as an experiment in crafting a Yo La Tengo-esque song quickly comes into its own, marked by a frenetic tempo shift that is more indicative of the album's fervent nature, never allowing the listener to rest on their laurels.
On the song, member Ben Grigg adds: "There’s no grand theme behind the words here, they just always felt right. Like, these were the right sounds to make. The song to me is a vehicle for that soaring guitar lead line, which gets reprised after the tempo change."
"Allergy 2000" arrives with a music video directed by the band and follows up previously released singles "Turtle of Reaper" and "Universal," which earned the project notable support from Bandcamp, Billboard, BrooklynVegan, CREEM, FLOOD, Small Albums, Various Small Flames, and many others.
Where the band initially existed as a lockdown-inspired duo, Babe Report became a fully-fledged four-piece on the aforementioned The Future of Teeth EP, with Ben Grigg (Whelpwisher, FCKR JR, Geronimo!) and Emily Bernstein (FCKR JR) expanding their line-up to include Peter Reale (Yeesh) on drums and Mech on bass. Such reinforcements grow exponentially here, and they come to define Did You Get Better. Both a bigger and more accomplished version of the band than we’ve heard to date, the album boasts a woozy concoction of 90s-drenched guitars and melodic grooves.
Recorded over just one weekend in November 2023, using several one-of-a-kind prototype mics at Radon Ranch - Ben and Emily’s humble basement studio - the songs here are both gripping in their immediacy and wholly intoxicating. Embracing disorder throughout, Babe Report funnel their influences into something both boisterous and exuberant; a thunderstorm trapped inside a bottle.
A tumultuous tale, the album is part snapshot of the band’s singular and curious perspectives but also of their surroundings in Jefferson Park, an area that is rife with inspiration. “We practice on Wednesdays when the hyper-local Nadig Newspaper is delivered. We invariably spend the first few minutes of practice reviewing the weekly, idiotic antics of our Alderman,” the band says, while also citing “women driving cars with manual transmissions, the cult of fame and personality, and dreams of throwing your severed body parts into the ocean” as part of the album’s idiosyncratic nature.
However it finds you or you find it, Did You Get Better finds a way to take the reigns, plowing headfirst into its journey and rarely looking back for approval, to even worry if anyone else is joining for the ride. Through its intense rushing and the occasional moments of cessation, it showcases a band in a bold and brilliant new chapter, highlighting the power of growth and collaboration in a way that feels considerably and endearingly forthright.
Today, Bay Area trio Sour Widows share “Staring Into Heaven/Shining” the entrancing new single and album closer from their recently announced debut record Revival Of A Friend, out June 28th on Exploding In Sound Records. The song comes with a video directed by Henry Kinder that was shot across Golden Gate Park and Ocean Beach in San Francisco and Thee Stork Club in Oakland.
"After my mom passed in late June of 2021, I went on a trip in August of that year in an attempt to put physical distance between myself and the pain of what I had just experienced. I was searching for relief wherever I thought I could find it; ultimately, that trip taught me that grief cannot be outrun,” Susanna Thomson explains. “‘Staring Into Heaven/Shining’ is a confessional song, written at a time when I was desperate to gain control over my life through ideas I had about grieving the ‘right’ way. As I tried and failed to reconcile feelings of regret and unanswerable questions, it became clearer to me that all I can do is choose to simply observe the experience of grief. The lyrics are searching, but come to their natural end in a place without resolution; it wasn’t until after finishing the song that I realized there can be hope in accepting that there are things we cannot know about death.”
Sour Widows have expanded their previously announced summer tour dates to include a fall run with youbet. Tickets for the fall dates go on sale Friday 5/10 at 10am ET via sourwidows.com
In the seven years since Maia Sinaiko and Susanna Thomson started Sour Widows, they have survived a litany of tragedies and tribulations. Sinaiko lost a partner to an accidental overdose just before the band began. Thomson’s mother was diagnosed with a rare cancer, which she lived with for four years before passing away in June 2021. As they prepared to enter Oakland’s Tiny Telephone in 2023 to make an album partly of songs about navigating those losses and the lives they shaped, more troubles mounted, including a traumatic breakup and Thomson’s father’s sudden cancer diagnosis.
Sour Widows has served as an essential outlet for Sinaiko, Thomson, and drummer Max Edelman, a way to process real-time woes so as to transmute them into something beautiful, useful, real, and lasting. It has been an anchor, too, keeping them lashed to reality as the world roiled around them. Revival Of A Friend, the band’s entrancing and powerful debut album is their collective testament to that process, an hour-long lesson in endurance that is years in the making.
Inspired by the folk singing of their youth, the grit and grace of Joni Mitchell, the slowly spiraling dazzle of Duster and Bedhead, and the steady angularity and sudden snarl of Slint, Revival of a Friend fully recognizes the arbitrary cruelty of individual existence and finds that some of the best ways beyond it are to share harmonies, a tangle of electric guitars, or a song that simply imagines hope somewhere on the other side. Methodically built over many years, the album is a poignant and gripping record about the pain of growing up and getting on with it.
Tour Dates: 6/2: San Francisco, CA - Union Street Festival 6/16: Davis, CA - Davis Music Festival 6/20: San Diego, CA - Voodoo Room ^ 6/21: Santa Ana, CA - Constellation Room ^ 7/10: Seattle, WA - Sunset Tavern 7/11: Portland, OR - Mississippi Studios 7/13: San Francisco, CA - The Independent 7/26: Los Angeles, CA - Zebulon 9/9: Atlanta, GA - 529 Club * 9/10: Nashville, TN - DRKMTTR * 9/11: Asheville, NC - Eulogy * 9/12: Washington, DC - Comet Ping Pong * 9/13: Philadelphia, PA - Johnny Brenda's *
A couple of weeks back, Babe Report – the Chicago band comprising members of Yeesh (Tiny Engines), Geronimo! (Exploding In Sound), and FCKR JR (Born Yesterday) – announced signing to Exploding In Sound for their forthcoming debut album, Did You Get Better, set to release on May 31. The news arrived with media support from Billboard, BrooklynVegan, FLOOD, and others – the latter hailing the lead single for "bridging the gap between the current movements in power-pop, pop-grunge, and other DIY rock subgenres."
Today, Babe Repoert return with the album's second single, "Universal," which offers something somewhat more refined, with occasional moments of restraint amid the commotion that arrives in a hardy whack of heavy riffs. “This one is all about climbing up onto your neighbor’s back to succeed,” the band explain. “Most aspects of life are not a zero-sum game, but when they are, it feels ethically wrong to win."
Where the band initially existed as a lockdown-inspired duo, Babe Report became a fully-fledged four-piece on the aforementioned The Future of Teeth EP, with Ben Grigg and Emily Bernstein expanding their line-up to include Peter Reale on drums and Mech on bass. Such reinforcements grow exponentially here, and they come to define Did You Get Better. Both a bigger and more accomplished version of the band than we’ve heard to date, the album boasts a woozy concoction of 90s-drenched guitars and melodic grooves.
Recorded over just one weekend in November 2023, using several one-of-a-kind prototype mics at Radon Ranch - Ben and Emily’s humble basement studio - the songs here are both gripping in their immediacy and wholly intoxicating. Embracing disorder throughout, Babe Report funnel their influences into something both boisterous and exuberant; a thunderstorm trapped inside a bottle.
A tumultuous tale, the album is part snapshot of the band’s singular and curious perspectives but also of their surroundings in Jefferson Park, an area that is rife with inspiration. “We practice on Wednesdays when the hyper-local Nadig Newspaper is delivered. We invariably spend the first few minutes of practice reviewing the weekly, idiotic antics of our Alderman,” the band says, while also citing “women driving cars with manual transmissions, the cult of fame and personality, and dreams of throwing your severed body parts into the ocean” as part of the album’s idiosyncratic nature.
However it finds you or you find it, Did You Get Better finds a way to take the reigns, plowing headfirst into its journey and rarely looking back for approval, to even worry if anyone else is joining for the ride. Through its intense rushing and the occasional moments of cessation, it showcases a band in a bold and brilliant new chapter, highlighting the power of growth and collaboration in a way that feels considerably and endearingly forthright.
Mandy, the solo project of Chicago-based Miranda Winters (Melkbelly), today has shared her cover of Jimmy Webb’s “Now That I’m a Woman.” The muted, stripped-back track–out now alongside a Bart Winters-directed video–is the latest single from her forthcoming new album Lawn Girl, out this Friday, April 26th, via Exploding In Sound Records. “‘Now That I'm a Woman’ is a cover of a song from one of the greatest movies ever made, The Last Unicorn,” Winters explains. “When Molly Grue meets the unicorn she says, ‘Where were you twenty years ago, ten years ago? How dare you, how dare you come to me now, when I am this?’ For me, this is a song about coming to terms with life and commiserating (with Lady Amalthea, you know, the unicorn transformed and trapped in the body of a mortal woman). I recorded this song when I was especially sick because I like the sound of a heavy vocal fold.” “Now That I’m a Woman” follows advance singles “High School Boyfriend” and “Forsythia,” which have earned support from Rolling Stone (Songs You Need playlist), Brooklyn Vegan, Stereogum, and more. Lawn Girl is now available for pre-order.
Winters, as the voice of Chicago’s much-loved noisemakers Melkbelly, has spent the past few years happily in her own shadow. While she has quietly written and occasionally released her own music for 15 years, she finally steps out into the bright light with the release of Lawn Girl. The album, a combination of older songs and newer creations, feels positively and endearingly alive–like a freeing of pent-up energy, an intimate rebuilding of the self. While Winters recorded and produced a number of the songs herself, she worked with Taylor Hales at Electrical Audio to feed those songs back into the studio, where they were re-recorded with room mics and worked back into the original versions. “I see it like photocopying,” she says of the process. “I’ve always loved working with photocopying and related printing techniques in my visual art because of the way everything decays and falls apart. It was nice to honor that on the record.”
Performed by an all-women band–Linda Sherman (guitar), Lizz Smith (bass) and Wendy Zeldin (drums)–the songs on Lawn Girl suitably find Winters ruminating on the idea of femininity; about her mom (who graces the album cover) and being a mother herself; her female friends; and what it means and what is required to make art and music in a female space intentionally.
Equally adept when recalling teen love as it is about reflecting on the relentless complexities of adulthood, Lawn Girl feels like both a beginning and an end: a line in the sand moment for a songwriter who has never stopped questioning where they are and how they got here. “When I think of these songs all together, I see the color green,” Winters says. “I’m seeing green for the very clichéd reason that the record feels like a rebirth, or a turning point, or a transition into a new phase of life. Some of this material has been floating around with me for a while, and I feel that by packaging it all up, I can say goodbye and move forward.”
Two years after the release of their exhilarating debut EP, Chicago noisemakers Babe Report announce their debut album, Did You Get Better, set for release on May 31 with Exploding In Sound. Consisting of ten new songs, all wrapped in under half an hour, it's an immediate and breathless arrival from the newly emerging project comprised of former FCKR JR members Ben Grigg (Geronimo!, Whelpwisher) and Emily Bernstein alongside drummer Peter Reale (Yeesh) and bassist Mech.
Alongside the announcement, Babe Report unveiled the lead single "Turtle of Reaper," which premiered today as a first listen via FLOOD. The album's opening track bursts forth in a flurry of noise and energy for a thrilling two-minute jaunt of scorched vocals and frenetic drums. On the track's origin, Babe Report's Grigg elaborates: "This is an indictment of what often feels like fear-mongering in click-bait media. I mention the Nadig News in particular since they religiously publish crime reports. I honestly find reading those fascinating, but it feels like a way to keep people on edge and xenophobic. I’m sure that’s not Nadig’s intention (I actually have heard Brian Nadig is cool and I respect that a family-run print newspaper can exist in 2024), but it comes off that way sometimes. Especially since it is often printed alongside a column by mega-wang Russ Stewart. Anyway, the chorus is a call back to 12/31/99, when all the news told people to turn off their computers before Y2K, or else!"
Where the band initially existed as a lockdown-inspired duo, Babe Report became a fully-fledged four-piece on the aforementioned The Future of Teeth EP, with Ben Grigg and Emily Bernstein expanding their line-up to include Peter Reale on drums and Mech on bass. Such reinforcements grow exponentially here, and they come to define Did You Get Better. Both a bigger and more accomplished version of the band than we’ve heard to date, the album boasts a woozy concoction of 90s-drenched guitars and melodic grooves.
Recorded over just one weekend in November 2023, using several one-of-a-kind prototype mics at Radon Ranch - Ben and Emily’s humble basement studio - the songs here are both gripping in their immediacy and wholly intoxicating. Embracing disorder throughout, Babe Report funnel their influences into something both boisterous and exuberant; a thunderstorm trapped inside a bottle.
A tumultuous tale, the album is part snapshot of the band’s singular and curious perspectives but also of their surroundings in Jefferson Park, an area that is rife with inspiration. “We practice on Wednesdays when the hyper-local Nadig Newspaper is delivered. We invariably spend the first few minutes of practice reviewing the weekly, idiotic antics of our Alderman,” the band says, while also citing “women driving cars with manual transmissions, the cult of fame and personality, and dreams of throwing your severed body parts into the ocean” as part of the album’s idiosyncratic nature.
However it finds you or you find it, Did You Get Better finds a way to take the reigns, plowing headfirst into its journey and rarely looking back for approval, to even worry if anyone else is joining for the ride. Through its intense rushing and the occasional moments of cessation, it showcases a band in a bold and brilliant new chapter, highlighting the power of growth and collaboration in a way that feels considerably and endearingly forthright.
