BEEHIVE CANDY

French for Rabbits - The Overflow. Surfacing nearly a decade ago from long oceanic shores, dream-pop luminaries French for Rabbits create music that feels like it has been crafted from the fabric of the New Zealand landscape and psyche – with its salty waves, isolated coastlines, expansive skies and friendly, approachable people. That is to say, their music is at once intimate and expansive, welcoming and wary, poetic but piercing. Emerging from a vibrant local folk scene alongside other idiosyncratic talents Marlon Williams, Aldous Harding, and Tiny Ruins, together the band have released three records - NZ Music Award nominated EP Claimed by the Sea; Spirits and 2019’s The Weight of Melted Snow.  They’ve toured in the US and Europe, opening for acts such as Lorde, Agnes Obel and performed at SXSW, Iceland Airwaves and WOMAD. Despite racking up millions of streams and seeing their music appear in shows from Vampire Diaries to Being Human, the band have remained close to their DIY ...

The Felice Brothers - Silverfish. The Felice Brothers have released “Silverfish,” the third song to be released from their forthcoming album From Dreams To Dust, out on September 17, 2021 via Yep Roc Records. They’ve also shared the official music video for the song, compiling found footage and micro insect video shot by James Felice himself. “I found all the bugs in this video just walking around where I live or work,” James explains. “I have a lens that I attach to my phone, and I keep a keen eye out. Little in life brings me more joy than seeing a speck of something on a leaf or a sidewalk, getting in close and observing a little life unfolding before my eyes." Rolling Stone described the album’s first single "Inferno" as “a swirl of blurry adolescent recollection and Nineties pop culture ephemera” and “...a promising taste of what’s to come.” The second single, “Jazz On The Autobahn,” received praise from Consequence of Sound, Cool Hunting, and was featured on NPR M...

Lakes - Retrograde. Watford based six-piece ensemble Lakes have just shared the moving new single Retrograde, taken from their forthcoming new record ‘Start Again’. The band recently announced their signing to Big Scary Monsters for the new album, out 30th July. Talking about the new single, co-lead vocalist Blue Jenkins said "Retrograde is inspired by a particular experience of trying and failing pretty spectacularly to navigate an avoidant attachment, despite impassioned arguments for the cause on both sides. It's about how confusing and frustrating it can feel to try and work together with somebody only to keep coming up against the same problems, and how sad it still is when you finally have to let it all go." After a handful of self-releases and a stint of heavy touring with the likes of Nervus and Orchards, the pandemic forced Lakes to slow down, having been catapulted a long way in a short space of time through consistent hard work and sheer tenacity. The six indi...

Penelope Antena - Back To Stay. Living and creating in the shadow of an esteemed family legacy, alone in the woods on a mountaintop in the Occitanie region of southern France, Penelope Antena is the heir to a musical throne of mythological stature… and one she lives up to with newfound ambition to push tradition into a 21st Century soundscape. Her 2019 self-produced LP Antelope (KowTow Records) put her otherworldly production style on full display, declaring Penelope as a visionary songwriter and creative force. Her mother is the renowned singer Isabelle Antena (a pioneer of Electro Samba), her grandfather jazz pianist Marc Moulin (the reason Blue Note opened its EU headquarters, and who was sampled by the likes of Jay Dilla). Fast forward to today and Penelope is carving out her own genre melding path that has garnered praise from the likes of Rolling Stone, Marie Claire, France Inter, and many others. By integrating tradition and technology, Penelope provides a unique voice in inter...

Vök - Skin. Icelandic trio Vök have shared the stunning video for their enchanting and reflective new single Skin, which is out now through Nettwerk Records. New single Skin follows recently released single and video Lost in the Weekend, which gave an early taste of their new material recorded last year in their Reykjavík studios. The single was the follow-up to their acclaimed 2019 album In the Dark, which was written and recorded by the band in collaboration with producer James Earp (Bipolar Sunshine, Fickle Friends, Lewis Capaldi). With every track, Vök continue to develop their progressive alt-pop sound and Skin cements just how intricately captivating the band can be. Opening emotively and delicately, the song builds to an ethereal and pensive chorus that lyrically conveys someone not knowing who they are and being stuck in their own ‘skin’. The expansive video, directed by Arnar Helgi, shows the band performing in a stunning location at Rauðhólar outside of Reykjavík amidst a ba...

Motorists - Through To You. Toronto's motorik jangle-pop trio, Motorists have just shared their new single, "Through To You" which arrives with an accompanying video inspired by the German TV show, Beat Club. In tandem with sharing the new music, the band are announcing their debut LP, Surrounded which comes mastered by Mikey Young (Total Control, Eddy Current Suppression Ring) and is set for release via We Are Time – a new label, part-helmed by Chandra Oppenheim – Bobo Integral and Debt Offensive on September 3, 2021. Driving is a huge part of rock and roll’s enduring mythology. Images of cruising down the highway with friends and lovers while basking in the freedom of the open road pervade pop music’s lyrical canon. Yet, so often, these idealized images clash with the everyday drudgery of being a motorist: traffic jams, detours, and bad news on the radio. This tension is central to Surrounded, an album that is as much about the colourful possibilities of life as it is a...

Ålesund - Dawn Chorus. Following up on the 2020 release of their second EP ‘All Hail To Your Queen’, Bristol-based atmospheric Alt-Pop quartet Ålesund return with upcoming EP ‘A Thread In The Dark’, due for release July 9th. After the untimely curtailing of their European Tour in Spring 2020 due to the COVID-19 outbreak, Ålesund travelled back to the UK feeling uncertain. Although things were going so well with a new offering and an extensive touring and festival schedule to get stuck into, the timing of the unplanned hiatus was less than ideal. Rather than take it to heart, the group’s vocalist and songwriter Alba Torriset retreated to her hometown of Hastings to try and reconnect with music in a positive way.  “With all the negativity in the world, I wanted to create something uplifting and optimistic,” she says, and so the four track EP ‘A Thread In The Dark’ was created. Alba and guitarist Lloyd Starr started to put together demos with a euphoric and festival-tinged edge. They ...

Jon Mckiel - Mourning Dove. By Jesse Locke · April 29, 2020: In 2015, cult Canadian indie-rocker Jon McKiel purchased a Teac A-2340 reel-to-reel recorder from a stranger online. After setting up the machine, he discovered one of the 30 tapes it came with contained recordings made by a previous owner. These included snippets of single instruments, vocals, and one nearly fully formed song.  Four years later, McKiel teamed up with producer Jay Crocker (Constellation Records’ experimental electronic artist JOYFULTALK) to transfer all the material they could excavate from the reels to a hard drive. McKiel then chopped the sounds into 10-second loops, and used those samples as a foundation for a series of eerie, psychedelic pop songs. The project was credited to a character who was partially McKiel, and partially the stranger who sold him the machine: Bobby Joe Hope. If Bobby Joe Hope has a predecessor, it’s the 2009 album Broadcast and the Focus Group Investigate Witch Cults of the Rad...

Warp Trio & Raina Sokolov-Gonzalez - The Well. A collaboration between Warp Trio, and the rising sensation Raina Sokolov-Gonzalez, “The Well” is a sweeping and epic tour de force that depicts the story of how isolation during the pandemic forces one to confront one’s self-identity, deal with their demons, and conquer them. The music video features the talents of amazing New York City dancer Emily Houghton with original choreography. Taken from their forthcoming album due out August 20, 2021, the new six track collection came about against the following background. "Like musicians all over the World, New York City’s Warp Trio entered the Fall of 2020 with a full instrumental record ready to go, but no tour to play it on. In light of their forced hiatus from road life, and in efforts to make something positive out of these dark days, they decided to get to work on a new record that would not only signify the times, but also one that they would purposefully not be able to feasib...

Alice Hubble - My Dear Friend. Alice Hubble has announced her new album Hexentanzplatz will be released on September 10th, 2021 via London-based electronic-pop label Happy Robots. Described as the work of ‘one lady at home with her enormous collection of synthesisers’, Alice Hubble mixes melancholic pop, layered vintage synths and elegant vocals, reminiscent of Ladytron, Jane Weaver and Goldfrapp. Her debut album Polarlichter was released in September 2019 to much critical acclaim. Lead single ‘My Dear Friend’ was inspired by the discovery of a collection of love letters written by Hubble’s mother to her father around the time that they first met. “My mother passed away when I was in my teens and these letters gave me a real insight into who she was as a person, her ‘newly in love’ giddiness jumping off the page,” she says. Her new album Hexentanzplatz, named after the German mountain steeped in magic and legend, translates literally to mean Witches’ Dance Floor. An apt title for an a...