BEEHIVE CANDY

The Special Pillow - Hudson River Dreamboat. Background - For the past two decades, The Special Pillow have operated from the margins of the marginal, creating a distinctive string-driven sound—a heady brew encompassing concise ’60s-flavored pop gems, dreamy psychedelic reveries, and a propulsive drive redolent of the antipodean indie acts of the ‘80s. In 2015, Yo La Tengo shined a light on the Pillow’s shadowy demimonde with their cover of the band’s “Automatic Doom.” Now, The Special Pillow unleash Sleeping Weird, their senses-shattering sixth album. Since the dissolution of cult heroes Hypnolovewheel, songwriter and majordomo Dan Cuddy has played bass with such notable combos as Sleepyhead and XL Kings, but has reserved his own compositions for The Special Pillow. Sleeping Weird is the group’s third project with engineer Mitch Rackin, recorded and mixed at Brooklyn’s Seaside Lounge recording studio. Featured players are charter Special Pillow member Katie Gentile (Run On, Mad S...

GRDNS - Roulette Love Gun. Background - Psychedelic rockers GRDNS share Roulette Love Gun, the third cosmic offering from their forthcoming EP out this summer via Dance To The Radio. Loaded with intricate, soaring guitar lines and hazy, atmospheric vocals, the quartet’s latest reverb-laden number ebbs and flows with precision and shows a band brimming with creativity following widespread acclaim from the online community. Having fast established themselves within the Yorkshire music scene and beyond, the four-piece will look to build on impressive support slots alongside Gengahr, Husky Loops and whenyoung with their debut festival appearances at Live At Leeds and Gold Sounds in the next few months. Produced by James Kenosha (Pulled Apart By Horses, Dinosaur Pile-Up, Rhodes) GRDNS’ Roulette Love Gun is out now and will be available on all platforms. GRDNS is Jacob Lyons (vocals/guitar), Sam Gledhill (guitar), Cameron Harrison (bass) and John Fitzpatrick (drums). TWITTER . Our thi...

Brooke Annibale - Glow. Background - Singer-songwriter/guitarist Brooke Annibale will release her third full-length album Hold To The Light on June 8th. The new record marks Annibale's return following her 2015 critically acclaimed album The Simple Fear and features several major departures in terms of both songwriting and production. Annibale sheds a few layers of her folk-acoustic skin and introduces a new indie-pop direction offering a fusion of textured electronic and traditional instrumentation centered around Brooke's stunning voice and keen, soulful lyricism. This week she released her radiant new single "Glow. The songs on Hold To The Light develop like Polaroid photos: each reveals a memory suspended between the perspective of the past with all its wistfulness, pain, and joy, and the revelations of the present. Produced by Sam Kassirer (Josh Ritter, Lake Street Dive) at his Great North Sound Society in Maine, Hold To The Light features contributions from seas...

Yonatan Gat - Cue The Machines. Background - Yonatan Gat recently shared his new album Universalists' opening track "Cue the Machines". The undefinable track opens with an Italo-Spanish choir recorded by Alan Lomax in 1950s Genoa – but it only takes 20 seconds for the voices get manipulated, chopped and mangled beyond recognition into stuttering rhythms below Yonatan's live band – guitar, bass, saxophone and drums working up an uncontrollable maelstrom of punk and free jazz. Since his days as co-founder of legendary Israeli garage-rockers Monotonix, Gat's music has always had a strong sense of chaos. Getting his start in a band that was wild enough to get banned from their home country has certainly sipped into Gat's manner as a bandleader. And the far-and-wide world travels that come with playing over 1500 shows in 50 countries and 5 continents made another mark on his sound. Universalists lists numerous collaborators, the most important of which being S...

The Pinkerton Raid - Where the Wildest Spirits Fly (New Album). Background - Durham, North Carolina’s The Pinkerton Raid makes ebullient, dynamic Americana and indie pop. The music starts with Jesse James DeConto’s intimate songwriting. A big, joyful band of six to 10 players can bring brilliant brass and bright harmonies. Or Jesse can whisper over plaintive picking on his ancient Gibson J45. It’s why The Pinkerton Raid has shared stages with high-energy pop acts like The Collection, The Soil & The Sun and The Old Ceremony or with gentle folk singers like Noah Gunderson, Denison Witmer, The Cactus Blossoms or Lowland Hum. They’ve played notable venues from The Surf Club in St. Paul to the Rock & Roll Hotel in Washington D.C. They’ve also played festivals and music series all over the East Coast and Midwest. Their self-titled debut in 2012 and their 2014 follow-up A Beautiful World won significant acclaim. Critics have hailed their 2017 effort, Tolerance Ends, Love Begins, ...

Kluster - In Your Hometown. Background - Kluster was founded by four friends and a virtual drummer in Malmö 2014, a real life drummer joined in shortly afterwards and the gang was complete. Since, the quintet has been active on as well the Malmö indie scene as playing shows in Berlin, Copenhagen, Stockholm, supporting acts such as Frankie Cosmos and Nicole Sabouné. Debut single Over My Head was released in February to praise from Line of Best Fit, Spotify's Fresh Finds and more. Today, the success of the debut is followed by new single In Your Hometown and the announcement of debut album civic, out June 15th via Rama Lama Records. In Your Hometown is yet another glimpse of Kluster's playful sound - a melting pot of broad influences such as pop, punk, noise, lo-fi, indie and jazz. According to the band, "In Your Hometown is somehow about paranoia; it's about a very scared man who hid in his hoody for all his life and never discovered the world around him. He was a ...

Wendy McNeill - This Hope. Background - Wendy McNeill does not need any further presentation, since the debut album 'Such A Common Bird' 2004, she has released five albums, made music and toured together with Ane Brun, The Tiny and worked with Loney Dear. Her sixth album "Hunger Made You Brave" has just been released and this week we get a music video to the single "This Hope". In this part of the world tonight- through the shadows there’s a bell that’s ringing- In this part of the world tonight- there’s a growl and the softest sigh- In this part of the world tonight- there’s a child, and I see her dancing- as she pivots her face toward me- she’s kicking at stars and laughing In this part of the world tonight- there’s a bear weightlessly lumbering- through the steps of a twice dead girl and the promise of a different world- In that part of the world tonight- there’s a river and a father crying sees wind messing with the reflection not the message that t...

Polychrome - Don't Be A Stranger. Background - “Don’t Be A Stranger” is an ode to Stranger Things title sequence composers Kyle Dixon and Michael Stein of Survive. Analog synths accompany Victoria’s ethereal vocals in the opening of the second single of the album. The track paints a parallel universe to the rest of the album, making it a standout track. Opposing the glossy synths of the lead-single “Final Kiss”, “Don’t Be A Stranger” leads the listener into ghostly, uneasy sonic territories. The track ends with distortion filters on both Victoria’s vocals and the lead synth, pulling us into a post-apocalyptic digital nightmare. 'We were binge-watching the Stranger Things on Netflix in between recording sessions, and we love the theme music Survive did. We had some time off whilst mixing the album, and so we had the idea of making the theme tune into a song - as an homage to the original. We got busy with the synths and vocoders, and just as we were finishing, there was a spo...

Ay Wing - Strange Background - “'Strange' tries to find humour in an age where many of our own identities seem based on an insta-filter and the right angle.” Ay Wing A parody of 21st-century digital narcissism, the video partnering ‘Strange’, the latest dazzling electro-pop release from Ay Wing, features the singer cast as various iconic movie characters, transported into the social media arena, taking selfies in the most precarious situations. Thus we have everyone from Princess Leia to Morticia Addams to Uma Thurman’s Mia Wallace wielding the selfie stick at inopportune moments. Inspired by Andy Warhol’s celebrated “...famous for 15 minutes” quote, ‘Strange’ continues Berlin-based singer-songwriter Ay Wing’s run of smart, slick poppy nuggets, with its bouncy synth foundations, indisputable earworm of a chorus and even a Baroque-style breakdown all sure to rack up the likes and shares on the very social media channels it cheekily pokes fun at. The track forms part of a ne...