Month: January 2021

Indie music has grown to include so much. It’s not just music that is released on independent labels, but speaks to an aesthetic that deviates from the norm and follows its own weirdo heart. It can come in the form of rock music, pop, or folk. In a sense, it says as much about the people that are drawn to it as it does about the people that make it.

Every week, Uproxx is rounding up the best new indie music from the past seven days. This week we got the a surprise new album from Typhoon, a new track from Hand Habits, and an exciting new album featuring Sufjan Stevens and Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon. Check out the rest of the best new indie music below.

Rhye – Home

Mike Milosh has been pretty prolific throughout the 2010s and into the 2020s, and his latest LP Home doesn’t falter in its dreamy and ambitious approach. “It seems trite to describe Rhye as indie-pop given the grand melodies, powerful beats, and strikingly idiosyncratic perspectives that comes across in Mike Milosh’s singular music,” wrote Steven Hyden in a recent issue of the Indie Mixtape newsletter.

Typhoon – Sympathetic Magic

Almost three years to the date after unleashing their last album Offerings, Typhoon is back with a surprise new LP, which dropped out of the sky last Friday. Sympathetic Magic is as politically-charged as Typhoon has ever gotten on a record, taking on the pandemic and political unrest that has been on full display over the last year.

CARM – CARM

CJ Camerieri has had a hand in recent music from Taylor Swift, Paul Simon, The National, and plenty more, but now he has centered his focus on the release of a self-titled debut album under the moniker CARM, which features flourishes of horns and entrancing instrumentation, along with guest appearances from Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon, Sufjan Stevens, and members of Yo La Tengo.

Kiwi Jr – Cooler Returns

Just over a year after releasing their debut album Football Money, Toronto quartet Kiwi Jr. are back with their sophomore effort, successfully building upon the template that quickly garnered them comparisons to Pavement. On Cooler Returns, the band’s “shambolic yet catchy songs are loaded with fractured riffs and lyrical non-sequiturs,” wrote Steven Hyden in a recent issue of the Indie Mixtape newsletter.

The Head And The Heart – Rivers And Roads: Live From Pike Place Market

In August of 2019, Seattle natives The Head And The Heart found themselves performing atop the city’s iconic Pike Place Market to 30,000 fans, the same market where they would busk at the beginning of their journey as a band a decade ago. The performance included energetic versions of tracks from throughout the band’s career, including “Honeybee” and “Missed Connection.” The group commemorated the event with a concert film and album, which can be watched in full on Amazon.

Palberta – Palberta5000

New York art-punk trio Palberta has been forging ahead over the last several years, dropping impressive album after impressive album. Palberta5000 might be the most intriguing of all the band’s releases to date, with Steven Hyden praising the band for finding “the middle ground between minimalist, deconstructionist indie and the danceable grooves and relentless rhythms of funk and R&B” in the latest Indie Mixtape newsletter.

Camp Trash – Downtiming EP

After generating a good amount of hype around their debut EP with the release of two promising singles, Camp Trash made good on the promise of an excellent (albeit short) collection of emo-inspired power pop tracks with Downtiming. The EP’s four tracks feel like a throwback to the height of teen movies, where a song like “Bobby” could soundtrack a high schooler surfing the internet for the first time. They should hang out with Beabadoobee.

Chai – “Action”

Japanese quartet Chai signed to esteemed indie label Sub Pop for their third full-length album Wink. “Action” is a great first taste of the LP, with glitchy electronic production and Mana’s affected vocals giving the song a unique futuristic aesthetic.

Hand Habits – “4th Of July”

Hand Habits’ Placeholder was one of our favorite albums of 2019, and now Meg Duffy is back with all new music on Dirt EP. The effort’s lead single “4th Of July” is what Derrick Rossignol calls for Uproxx a “climactic folk-rocker,” a slow-burning number that features little more than guitar and vocals at the outset before building to a dreamy, cinematic conclusion.

Matthew E. White & Lonnie Holley – “This Here Jungle Of Moderness/Composition 14”

Sometimes, it takes the creative push of a collaborative partner to help create your best work. This is the case for Matthew E. White and Lonie Holley, who claim in a press release that their new five-track effort Broken Mirror: A Selfie Reflection features the most exciting and explosive tracks of their collective careers. Lead single “This Here Jungle Of Moderness/Composition 14” is a sprawling seven-minute epic that encompasses everything from avant garde to funkadelic.

Deb Never – “Someone Else”

After running into a creative dry spell in Los Angeles, Deb Never packed her bags and booked a one-way flight to London, where she moved in with longtime collaborator Michael Percy with the only goal of writing an onslaught of music. “Someone Else” is the first taste of Never’s “London period,” a lo-fi indie number produced by Jam City that opens in a subdued, reflective nature before a hyper pop beat drops and transforms the song into something resembling a dance track.

Some artists covered here are Warner Music artists. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

“Who is Rico Nasty?” Uproxx gives you a chance to find out in the latest installment of our “Who Is…?” documentary series focusing on the colorful DMV rapper/fashion icon. In the mini-doc, Rico recounts her growth from a boarding school student named Maria to the badass symbol of feminine self-determination she’s become thanks to hits like “Smack A Bitch,” “Key Lime OG,” “Own It,” and “OHFR?”

“I always had tough skin,” she admits. “I always left out the house with a chip on my shoulder like, ‘Hey, look, bitch. I’m here though. I’m alive!’” Rico explains how being a loner who classmates thought was weird set the stage for her to be the rebellious role model she is today. “I’m just happy that when another Black girl does this, she won’t feel so different,” she says. “I know that there’s a lot of other girls that are like me that are probably to be whoever they are or who they wanna be, but I make room for that.”

Watch Uproxx’s “Who Is Rico Nasty?” documentary above.

Nightmare Vacation is out now via Atlantic Records. Get it here.

Rico Nasty is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

Usually, artists release new songs or albums on Friday, which allows the material to have a full week of tracking activity for Billboard chart consideration and therefore give it the best chance to place highly on the weekly ranks. However, Billie Eilish and Rosalía released their new collaboration, “Lo Vas A Olvidar,” on January 21, which was a Thursday. That means it only had one day to make an impact on the charts, and sure enough, it did: The single debuted at No. 45 on the Hot Latin Songs chart dated January 30, which gives Eilish her first appearance on the chart.

Eilish recently spoke about the track with Zane Lowe and said of it, “I love it. I actually think it’s so beautiful and it’s not something I feel like I’ve done. [Rosalía] just opened a little channel in me that I hadn’t tried out before. Obviously, a lot of it is in Spanish, which I think is so important. […] It went through lots of stages, which is kinda rare for us. Usually the production we do is the production we end up with. This one was really not that way. The time I heard it when it was done, I was just like, ‘This is so weird.’ I don’t feel like I’ve heard a song that sounds like this.”

It’s an emotional day around the NBA and the basketball world in general, as Tuesday marks the one-year anniversary of the tragic helicopter crash that killed Kobe Bryant, his daughter Gianna, and seven others. Friends, fans, family, and peers have come together to pay tribute to the Lakers legend who is gone far too soon.

Beloved and admired among his contemporaries, Kobe has also influenced an entire generation of up-and-coming basketball players, as numerous stars around the league have, on various occasions, talked about the ways they’ve modeled their game after one of the most unique talents in NBA history.

Kobe’s leap from high school to the NBA was still something of a rarity at the time, but those who were lucky enough to witness him put his enormous talents on display in the lead-up to the 1996 NBA Draft were left in awe by what they saw. Now, a brief but compelling piece of video evidence has finally emerged showing Kobe doing the Mikan drill.

On first glance, it might not look that impressive. But the rigorous physical demands required to jump that high and that quickly for a solid minute is much harder than seems on the surface and speaks directly to both his otherworldly athleticism at such a young age and, perhaps more important, his competitive nature.

Just ask Rex Kalamian, the Lakers video coordinator at the time, who called it “probably the most athletic Mikan drill you’re ever going to see,” via the LA Times. Kalamian had the wherewithal to preserve a good chunk of the VHS tape of Kobe’s workout instead of recording over it, as was standard practice.

There is apparently more than an hour of footage remaining that has yet to be released, and we can only hope we’ll eventually get to see more of it, as we continue to honor Kobe’s memory in whatever way we can.

Grammy-nominated singer Andra Day is less than a month away from making her acting debut in Hulu’s forthcoming feature The United States vs. Billie Holiday. Of course, no story of Holiday’s life is complete without paying tribute her thought-provoking music. Previewing the film’s soundtrack, Day now shares her powerful original song “Tigress & Tweed.”

Over vintage-sounding piano keys, Day showcases her evocative voice while proving she was the perfect choice to portray the iconic singer in the biopic. Throughout the lyrics, Day touches on Holiday’s venerable protest song “Strange Fruit.”

Speaking about the songwriting process, Day said she hopes the song gives listeners strength:

“If Billie Holiday were with us now, I believe she’d want to see ‘Strange Fruit’ evolved. If ‘Strange Fruit’ was a call to awareness, ‘Tigress & Tweed’ is a call to action because she laid the groundwork. Raphael Saadiq sent the perfect track and the lyrics finally came to me like a flood after a prayer one day. I hope people are strengthened by Truth and Love when they hear it.”

Listen to Day’s “Tigress & Tweed” above and watch The United States vs. Billie Holiday trailer below.

The United States vs. Billie Holiday premieres 2/26 on Hulu.

Andra Day is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

The Indiana Pacers announced a major bit of news on Tuesday afternoon involving the health and well-being of recently-acquired wing Caris LeVert. After previously revealing that a mass was identified on LeVert’s left kidney during a routine physical following his trade as part of the gigantic deal that sent James Harden to Brooklyn, the Pacers announced that LeVert underwent surgery to treat renal cell carcinoma, a form of kidney cancer.

Thankfully, LeVert — who had credited the trade for unveiling this, saying “I was 100% healthy so in a way this trade definitely showed and revealed what was going on in my body.” — is expected to make a full recovery, per the team.

“Caris LeVert underwent successful surgery on Monday to treat renal cell carcinoma of his left kidney,” the Pacers said in a statement. “The surgery was performed by Dr. Jason Sprunger at Community North Hospital in Indianapolis, Ind. No further treatment is needed. Caris is expected to make a full recovery and will be out indefinitely. Further updates will be provided as needed.”

LeVert making his debut for the Pacers, whenever that may end up being, is obviously second to the fact that this was identified and treated as soon as possible. This is a scary thing for anyone to have to deal with, particularly due to the fact that it came from out of left field, and hopefully LeVert is back to being 100 percent as soon as possible.

It seems surreal that Tuesday is the one-year anniversary of Kobe Bryant’s passing. Of course, it still feels surreal that Bryant is gone after a helicopter crash that also took his daughter, Gianna, and seven others, but for many in the basketball world, Tuesday offered up the opportunity to look back on Bryant’s life and tenure in and around the NBA.

A number of individuals, whether they be current and former players and coaches or larger institutions, took to their Twitter accounts to offer up a kind word to Bryant and the rest of those who passed away.

In an interview with TMZ, one of Bryant’s former coaches, Byron Scott, discussed the importance No. 24 had in his life, to the point that he finds himself thinking about who he calls an “unbelievable person” on a daily basis.

“There’s two people that passed away in my life,” Scott said. “My mom, who I think about all the time, and ‘Showboat.’ I think about him every day. It’s something about him that, in my life, every day something brings me back to a memory of KB.”

The Lakers, unsurprisingly, offered up a tribute, too, calling both Kobe and Gianna “family,” a sentiment that the NBA shared.

Honoring both Bryants was also done by another team for which Kobe suited up, USA Basketball, and by another one of the many residents of the Staples Center, the L.A. Sparks.

UConn women’s basketball decided to remember Gianna, a well-documented Huskies fan who had ambitions of suiting up for Geno Auriemma’s program some day.

Even FIBA chimed in, recalling one specific Kobe moment from a game that the United States played against Brazil back in 2007.

It seems certain that Tuesday will feature dozens more tributes to Bryant as the day goes on, both on social media and during the three games that the league has on its schedule this evening. Then again, it’s hard to watch or follow basketball without seeing someone pay tribute to Bryant in some form or fashion.

Pasadena-based artist Charlie Hickey has a new EP coming out in February, Count The Stairs. The effort is produced by Marshall Vore, who got his collaborator Phoebe Bridgers to lend her vocals to the track “Ten Feet Tall.” Hickey shared a lo-fi visual for the song today, and Bridgers went above and beyond the role of backing vocalist by riding a scooter in the video.

Bridgers shared the track on Twitter and wrote, “very, very proud of this one.”

Hickey says of the song:

“‘Ten Feet Tall’ is sort of a different animal than any other song I’ve written. I was going to school at the time and was feeling quite alienated in this little world where everybody was instantly partying with their brand new best friends and fun came so naturally. I found solace in Marshall’s studio on the weekends. This was our first proper attempt at writing together and we were writing something really horrible. We were both kind of delirious and Marshall started singing the verse melody for the song as a joke, making fun of what we had been trying to write. But when I heard it, I said to him, ‘Wait, that’s the song that we’ve been trying to write.’ After that, we wrote the rest that night and recorded it the next day. We re-recorded it a few times before going back to what we did that day. I’ve never written or recorded a song like that since, and we weren’t sure it was even gonna come out but when I hear it back, it really serves as a time capsule of a very confusing/depressing but also very fruitful and fun time in my life!”

Listen to “Ten Feet Tall” above and find the Count The Stairs art and tracklist below.

1. “No Good At Lying”
2. “Count The Stairs”
3. “Two Haunted Houses”
4. “Seeing Things”
5. “Ten Feet Tall”
6. “Notre Dame”

Count The Stairs is out 2/26 via Charlie Hickey.

The RX is Uproxx Music’s stamp of approval for the best albums, songs, and music stories throughout the year. Inclusion in this category is the highest distinction we can bestow and signals the most important music being released throughout the year. The RX is the music you need, right now.

Given the method of BRS Kash’s introduction, it’d be silly to expect a wide breadth of topics and a ton of lyrical depth on his debut project, Kash Only. His current viral popularity was ushered in on the wave of goodwill generated by “Throat Baby,” a tongue-in-cheek ode to oral sex that turned a request for head into a woozy, nigh-romantic anthem. With that kind of calling card, anyone hoping for trenchant takes on the state of the criminal justice system or pensive reflections on mental health should already know to look elsewhere.

But while so many purveyors of pop-heavy, club-ready party rap anthems often experience difficulty extending their festive feats beyond their initial breakout hits, on Kash Only, the Atlanta native finds a comfortable groove in which his raunchy rhymes can revel. Moving along at a brisk pace and utilizing sticky, unique-sounding hooks throughout, Kash Only is a lighthearted introduction to LVRN’s latest addition and proves he has the juice to keep the party going past his signature single (and its equally racy remix).

It doesn’t take long for Kash to establish that while the goopy crooning on “Throat Baby” is surely the most effective tool in his kit, it’s far from the only one. On intro “No Manners,” he glides assuredly over a JetsonMade-inspired conglomerate of skittering 808s and whimsical recorder tunes — you know, those little baby flutes from your primary school music class — adopting a flow that is fittingly reminiscent of DaBaby’s and coolly referencing Nelly’s Country Grammar to describe his ideal girl.

Intriguingly enough, Jetsonmade does make a pair of appearances after clearly inspiring that intro, on “Shake,” which reprises the flutey sounds of “No Manners” with a beat that could also have appeared on one of DaBaby’s last few singles. Fortunately, the album changes gears before this trick can get stale, and “Yea,” Jetson’s second appearance on the album, more closely resembles the work Wheezy and P’ierre Bourne put in on Young Thug’s So Much Fun. Kash also manages a serviceable enough impression of Thugger on the few tracks in this vein, but his best mode is when he ditches Atlanta’s signature cartoon trap sound entirely.

“Kash App,” a surefire fan-favorite collab with Mulatto, secures the first of several New Orleans Bounce-influenced beats by Baby Breeze and ZachOnTheTrack on the album. Over the uptempo production, Kash evokes the king of all booty shake records, Juvenile’s “Back That Azz Up,” with both sonic callbacks from his collaborators and a “wobbledy-wobbledy” for good measure. However, Mulatto steals the show, not only balancing his testosterone-fueled perspective with a feminine counterpoint but also out-boasting him from her opening lines: “I need the CashApp ‘fore I make that ass clap / Bet when he be layin’ with his bitch he havin’ flashbacks.”

Another standout courtesy of Breeze and Zach is “Dance On The Dick,” a high-speed twerker almost guaranteed to spark a social media dance challenge. Were the strip clubs not shut down by a global pandemic, this would be the track to incite dollar-bill flurries and the most impressive displays of side-to-side booty work and the most enthusiastic drops. This is where Kash appears to be having — and provoking — the most fun. While it’s fun to hear his breezy interpretation of the Thugger moan, his staccato delivery is more propulsive, even if it does sound slightly derivative of DaBaby.

With few songs clocking in at over three minutes, Kash has just enough time to showcase his versatility without wearing out his welcome — or his limited subject matter. Kash’s lyrics can sometimes lean into being too simplistic and there isn’t much variation beyond anthems dedicated to tricking off on women, having sex with women, or the one song about getting his heart broken by women, “Thug Cry.” And this sequence on “Dance On The Dick” is downright cringey: “She’s a hottie, plus she got a body / And she do pilates, ride the dick like a Ducati / I like some wasabi, Chinese bitch, I call her taki.”

But overall, Kash’s splashy debut exhibits all the hallmarks of a natural hitmaker. He doesn’t push the boundaries much, with nearly every song on the album offering a variation on a proven formula (acoustic guitar + 808s, flute + 808s, late-’90s classic samples), but he’s skilled enough as a songwriter to overcome the limitations of his narrow range of topics and derivative beats and flows. He’ll need to expand his repertoire if he wants to really stick around but with LVRN, he’s got the right management team behind him to ensure he’ll make the right moves to maximize his potential. Sometimes, less is more, and as long as he can continue to create interesting, engaging, and distinctive spins with a limited palette, he’ll keep proving that aphorism to be accurate.

Kash Only is out now via LVRN/Interscope. Get it here.

At the end of last September, regular subscribers of Dax Shepard’s Armchair Expert received an unscheduled bonus episode titled simply, “Day 7.” Based on the title and the language that fans of Shepard’s podcast have become accustomed to over the years, it wasn’t difficult to discern what the episode would be about that morning. Shepard had relapsed.

Except for who it was and the way it played out publicly on a very popular podcast, Shepard’s story was not particularly unusual. He got in a motorcycle accident earlier in 2020, and he was prescribed pills for the pain. He started saving them in order to take two at a time so that he could get high. Eventually, he began buying pills to augment his prescription. Early on during the pandemic, Shepard lied about his prescription drug use to his wife, Kristen Bell; he also lied to his podcast producer, Monica Padman; and he even lied to his AA group. He accepted the cake for his 16th year of sobriety while high.

In the end, Shepard came clean on “Day 7” because of the themes of transparency and honesty that have made his podcast so popular. However, as he told Ellen Degeneres on her Tuesday episode, he really “did not want” to go public with his relapse “at all.” He worried about the embarrassment of the revelation, but he also had “bizarre fears” about losing his podcast.

“I have sponsors on my show — is that something that could cost me money financially?” he wondered.

In the end, however, the fear of losing his audience by not being honest is what drove him to come clean. “I get so much esteem out of being someone who’s vocally sober,” he told DeGeneres. “And I have people who write me — ‘I’m month one’ or ‘I’m week two’ — and I love that. That’s my favorite thing about being in public, and so I was just terrified I would lose that. I really cherish that.”

A friend, however, showed Shepard how to see the confession in a new light. “If your real goal is to help people,” his friend told him, “it’s not very helpful that you’re 16 years sober and married to Kristen Bell. In fact, that probably makes their life worse. So the fact that you just fell, that’s the actual value.” Once Shepard was able to gain that perspective, “it got a lot easier.”

The Armchair Expert, meanwhile, continues on. Yesterday, Justin Timberlake was the guest on Shepard’s 286th episode.