Sister Wives - KiKi Holli - Shannen Moser

Sister Wives - Ticking Time Bomb.

Inspired by Welsh mythology, thread throughout a cavernous mix of psychedelia, folk, post-punk, garage and 70s glam rock, Sister Wives recently announced their debut album will be released on 28th October via Libertino Records, sharing first single and video ‘Greater Place’. Now the band share new single “Ticking Time Bomb” - a track which sees them react to the societal pressure to bear a child; the ticks mirroring the biological clock.

The track's simmering verses give way to a lively, electric hook; it’s simultaneously a protest song and a party song that celebrates freedom and choice. “We wanted to expose the absurdity of having our bodies and choices so heavily monitored and managed by society, and laugh in the face of it,” the band explain. “We know our worth isn’t changed by child bearing, we are not disposable or “geriatric” after age 35, and we refuse to partake in the shaming of ourselves or others for our/their choices. And we deserve autonomy over our bodies, always!”

Y Gawres, the album’s title, is inspired by the ancient burial site on Anglesey, Barclodiad y Gawres, which translates to “The Giantess’ Apronful”. While giants are central to the nation’s folklore, it’s rare to hear of female giants. The idea led the Sheffield-based band — consisting of Donna Lee (vocals/keys/synths), Rose Love (vocals/bass), Liv Willars (vocals/guitar), Lisa O’Hara (vocals/drums) — to picture a devastating, nurturing, awe-inspiring, and most importantly feminine force of their own.

The lyrics are divided between English and Lee’s native Welsh, and the country is deeply present across the album. It’s important to Lee to represent the Welsh language outside of Wales, with the band often making connections with Welsh audience members and showing others that singing in the language is viable and meaningful.

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KiKi Holli - Sun Playing Tricks On Me.

Los Angeles indie-pop vocalist KiKi Holli creates stunning and soulful music woven with intricate emotive storytelling for a truly captivating and cathartic listening experience with an eclectic musical aesthetic. Holli draws on inspiration from her rich theatrical background, as well as from iconic artists such as PRINCE, Dusty Springfield, The Cure, Stevie Nicks and Siouxsie and the Banshees.

Her latest single "Sun Playing Tricks On Me" is a sultry fever dream in a mirage of lost love. "Sun Playing Tricks", produced and mixed by Grammy nominated Ethan Allen, is an exciting alt-pop song with a soulful vibe. Recorded at Royal Triton Studios in Silverlake, CA. Mastered by Grammy winner, David Collins. The song is layered with warm sun- dripped vocals full of depth. With a new EP in the works, KiKi Holli creates relatable music that culminates into a diary of hope for listeners across the globe.

Originally from Pittsburgh, PA, Holli was drawn to the arts from an early age, with her passions gravitating towards music and theater. Subsequently, she found solace in these disciplines and later earned her BFA in voice and theater for further exploring her unique talents. In addition to being a trained vocalist, Holli also grew up playing the guitar, saxophone and viola. Theatrically she has appeared on stage in the plays Of Mice and Men, Three Sisters and Twelfth Night, and also played the lead role in the Rocky Horror-channeling indie film Isle of Lesbos, celebrated by Swampflix as “a politically angry, deliberately offensive, post-John Waters, queer-as-f*ck movie musical with deep roots in drag & cabaret traditions.”

Most notably, Holli co-wrote and starred in Forever Dusty, a stage musical based on the life of British pop star Dusty Springfield. The production opened off-Broadway in 2012 at New World Stages in New York, garnering coverage from The Village Voice, Reuters, The New York Times and Out Magazine. From there, the play went on to run in Los Angeles and London, as well as other cities in the U.S. and U.K.

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Shannen Moser - Oh My God.

The Philadelphia-based artist Shannen Moser has just released a new single “Oh My God” from their forthcoming album The Sun Still Seems To Move that will be released next Friday, September 30 via Lame-O Records. Moser will celebrate the album’s release with shows in Philadelphia on 9/30 and in Brooklyn on 10/7 with support from Greg Mendez & Yours Are The Only Ears.

“Right before writing ‘Oh My God,’ I had just moved back to Philly after spending the summer in Berks County. I was working on farms and greenhouses that summer and spent a lot of my time outside. I had just ended an important relationship in my life. I was taking care of a sick parent. Everything felt unfamiliar and strange. I had spent the summer shape note singing, driving around and really exploring a natural world that I hadn’t been around in almost a decade,” explains Moser.

“Oh My God’ is a song that recognizes the multiple truths surrounding change and the timeline of our lives. It’s overwhelming and painful, but there’s also a hilarity to it. Like throwing your hands up in the air to concede that no matter how we might try, as the world turns things will change in an endless exchange of joy and sorrow".

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Shannen Moser - Sara Noelle - Sara Niemietz

Shannen Moser - Ben.

The Philadelphia-based artist Shannen Moser just released “Ben,” the second single from their forthcoming album The Sun Still Seems To Move that will be released on September 30 via Lame-O Records. Moser announced they will celebrate the album’s release with shows in Philadelphia on 9/30 and in Brooklyn on 10/7 with support from Greg Mendez & Yours Are The Only Ears.

Shannen Moser explains the story behind “Ben”: When I was in the 3rd grade I made a friend who I would ride the bus with to school for the next 8 years. We were neighbors in an extremely rural county – the kind of rural that was kids riding their family tractors to school and cow crossings holding up “highway” traffic. The streets around our houses didnt get paved until I was in middle school. They didn’t even paint the yellow road dividing lines on until after I graduated and moved away.

I would spend a lot of time with this friend on the bus. We shared a headphone splitter to listen to music, we would put sticks in the middle of the road at our bus stop to try to slow the bus down and miss school, and one time he gave me five bucks to lick the bus floor- totally normal kid stuff I thought to myself. On our route to school there was a pothole in the road that, if executed just right by the bus driver, would send whoever sat in back two rows FLYING. Ben called it “Rocket Man.” He was the first person I ever used a swear word in front of. “Shit!” He said it back and it was like we had just robbed a bank and gotten away with it. Cursing in secret, at the time, was the most romantic thing my middle school brain could ever imagine.

I moved away in 2012 and didn’t see him again after we graduated. He stayed to work at his dads construction business and passed late in 2015. I wrote this song in 2016. It was originally voice and piano only. I brought it to Tyler Bussey ( of Thank you Thank you) and we rearranged it a bit together. This song is my favorite on the record and I really love playing it for people live.

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Sara Noelle - Blooming Yucca.

Singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and actor Sara Niemietz’ fourth album, Superman, will be released on October 28th. The new album represents a reinvigorated era in her artistic continuum born from small, vulnerable moments brought on by lockdown and seismic, non-pandemic life changes. “This album is about speaking your piece, shaking off the past, and finding the superhero inside,” shares the LA-based creative polymath. 

She continues: “As a kid, I used to run around with this blanket tied around my neck and call myself ‘Super Sara.’ This is a return to that, and it’s the most representative thing I’ve done to date.” The empowering album is also a showcase for a new collaboration with co-writer and co-producer Linda Taylor, the ace guitarist on the hit ABC show Whose Line is It Anyway.

The pair met fortuitously on Sara’s last gig of 2020, a showcase with Tony Award-winning composer Jason Robert Brown, and just three days after their meeting, the world shut down. Sensing intuitive chemistry, Sara and Linda began to collaborate, tossing wildcard musical ideas and playlists back and forth.

During the height of COVID, the two began to collaborate in earnest. A feverish flow of ideas went back and forth as Linda and Sara finished tracks self-contained, with Sara handling all her vocals and vocal production and Linda layering the tracks and mixing the recordings. Soon, the pair had six songs, with Sara producing earthy and engaging videos for each one. In addition, Sara’s broad internet reach and innate marketing savvy enabled the duo to become a buzzed-about collaboration.

The twosome quickly nurtured a signature blend of soul, sonics, and story with passionate vocals and prominent guitars. Some of their artistic touchstones included Sister Rosetta Thorpe, Janis Joplin, Brittany Howard, and the early Kings Of Leon and D’Angelo. Sara says: “I’ve never been happy being tied to any genre. I grew up listening to Ella Fitzgerald, polka records, Led Zeppelin, and Steely Dan. When I was a little kid, I would plug a Fender Squier into a cheap amp, tune down to drop D, and put on concerts bashing out power chords.”

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Sara Niemietz - Locks.

"I wrote this song after a long desert drive in the summer — where the temperature and the endless road almost warps your perception of the landscape and of your own mind — the sky changes sometimes rapidly from dust clouds in the distance to bright sun to heavy rain. The one constant were the hundreds of yuccas, many in bloom, that lined the road, seen as dots in the expanse past my window."

Sara Noelle’s latest single, “Blooming Yucca,” is a surrealistic on-the-road song that winds its way through the dusty Southwest. The song was produced by Dan Duszynski in Dripping Springs, Texas. The animated, psychedelic “Blooming Yucca” video was created by Kelsey Boncato. Noelle, a singer-songwriter who creates indie folk and ambient-inspired music, is readying her third full-length LP, recorded and produced by Duszynski.

Her 2020 LP, Cover the Blue, featuring “Clouds” and “Run Sun Run,” was written at the piano and envisioned as a wandering hike between the haze of uncertainty and clarity. Noelle’s 2016 debut album, Morning Moon, plots an introspective drive up the Pacific coast, and fits somewhere between Alternative and New Age.


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Shannen Moser - A VOID

Shannen Moser - Paint By Number.

Philadelphia-based artist Shannen Moser announced their first album in more than four years The Sun Still Seems To Move will be released on September 30, 2022 via Lame-O Records. They also shared the official video for the album’s opening track “Paint By Number.”

“I wrote this song at a time when days truly just felt like the days were bleeding into one another. I had been experiencing a lot of change in my life and the dichotomy of monotony and chaos at the same time was really confusing - things felt slow and in that I found a lot of comfort despite the sadness and uncertainty. “‘A series of quiet moments makes forever’ you reply” - Leaning into the stillness of those kinds of feelings can be extremely humbling. This song is really an attempt at gratitude for the loved ones in my life and the experience of being able to quiet the darkness for one another,” explains Moser.

On The Sun Still Seems To Move, Moser’s third studio album, they take the arresting simplicity of their previous albums I’ll Sing (2018) and Oh, My Heart (2017) and combine it with orchestral swells and rich harmonies. What started as a simple vocals-and-guitar record soon shifted, as Moser experienced a sudden loss. Two years into writing the record, The Sun Still Seems To Move morphed into a texturally diverse and palatial sonic universe, mimicking the immeasurable scope of ever-changing circumstance. “At a certain point I was like, let’s just go for it. Let’s just really lean into the sadness of the world. I really wanted to make a thing that I had never made before, because I was feeling a way that I had never felt before,” explains Moser.

To piece together the patchwork of The Sun Still Seems To Move, Moser enlisted the help of their extended music community, including co-producer Alex Melendez, Tyler Bussey (Thank You Thank You/Strange Ranger), Julia Peters, Maxwell Stern, Tyler Carmody, Mark Nestman, Eric Muth and Josh Marre (Blue Ranger). Banjo, saxophone, cello, lap steel, woodwind and synth adorn the album, decorating Moser’s arrangements but never overwhelming them.

“Being able to have a space with my friends and make a record where I was allowed to fully make this art in the face of that pain was really, really beautiful,” they say. “The hands that have touched this record are really special.”

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A VOID - 5102.

Taken from their awaited second album ‘Dissociation’, due 9 September, the discordant new track blends clear and clamouring vocals with steady guitar lines and shadowy drum beats reminiscent of the grunge greats.

Drawing influence from the likes of Hole, Silver Chair, and Babes In Toyland, “5102” sees A VOID craft a sound that pays homage to the past while simultaneously making a hell-for-leather run toward the future.
Seesawing between calmer moments of melancholy and more emotive explosions of throbbing instrumentals and turbulent riffs, the track is rhythmic and riled-up in equal measure. Vocalist Camille Alexander explains:

“”5102” is a sombre grunge track starting with dissonant guitars that slowly progress into a deep emotional outburst. A  swim in the moonlight ending in a mermaid attack. The track’s mysterious name is ‘2015’ backwards: the year it was written, long before it was recorded. It’s about womanhood, using the metaphor of witches who have been stripped of their powers and their magic.”

The track arrives with a fantastical official video that offers a twisted take on some familiar fairy tales. Directed by the band’s own Camille Alexander, it was shot by Aeris Houlihan from Hexenhaus Productions and Claudia Du Lièvre. Starring Richard Simpson and Paige Burley alongside the band, additional footage was contributed by Neil Anderson.

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