VMP Magazine

Ruban Nielson believes you really know who he is. The secrets to his personality are all in his music, he says. Over the course of four albums as the songwriter and lyricist of Unknown Mortal Orchestra, including this year’s Sex & Food, he’s provided transparency into his life, his confusion, his vulnerabilities, all without a timestamp. Though songs like “American Guilt” and “Everyone Acts Crazy Nowadays” point to the influence of current affairs, music is bigger than political tropes, he says. “I think of music as being a bit more sacred than other things in my life,” Nielson said. “I think of politics as being really small compared to music. Not that music fixes anything, it doesn’t change anything, but when an artist makes something and it’s good, it survives. Ideologies come and go and people still listen to Mozart and Beethoven and Jimi Hendrix. Music is not caught up in these shifts.”

In March 2017, months before #MeToo and #TimesUp, London trio Dream Wife released “Somebody,” a poignant anthem dressed as a boppy punk track. The first single ahead of their 2018 full-length debut declared “I am not my body, I am somebody” over a whispering bassline, a notion women had long been rallying behind, though now consumed communally through the band’s dynamic live shows. Eventually the women, lead vocalist Rakel Mjöll, guitarist Alice Go and bassist Bella Podpadec began to notice the audience singing the refrain back to them, people of all genders approaching the band to share their appreciation for the song, showing off tattoos with the lyrics marked onto their skin forever. It felt like something was happening, a visceral reaction to political and social unrest, a cultural change sparked by a punk mindset.

Today marks the release of We’re Not Talking, the sophomore album from Australian trio The Goon Sax. We have a special edition of the album in our store right now, which you can buy here, and below, you can read about the creation of the album and how they try not to make art from anger.

Shamir's brand new album — and third in a year and a half — Resolution is out officially right now. You can buy our exclusive vinyl release of the album right here, and below, read an interview with Shamir about the album.

Hop Along open their third album, Bark Your Head Off, Dog, with a reflection on the passing of time. The song, “How Simple,” sees vocalist Frances Quinlan howling “Think I should stop checking myself out in the windows of cars / when I could see my future in her pictures of relatives,” an evocative meditation on one of our mortal habits. Tiny moments like this, magnified under Quinlan’s microscope, make Hop Along’s music human.

Coming to terms with the preciousness of life threads through Bark Your Head Off, Dog, from the nearly six-minute album closer “Prior Things,” a string-laden folksy meditation on missing your prime, to the twitchy, explosive “The Fox In Motion,” complete with a vision of solitary characters in the dark staring at glowing phones. “I was thinking a lot about trying to end patterns of behavior especially when it comes to accessing your own power,” Quinlan says. “The thing that gets difficult is you recognize those patterns but they're a very difficult thing to come up against, just to look at yourself is a hard thing to do. Then to work against yourself in a way to grow and find a place where you fit because you don’t fit where you did anymore.”

“There’s no college course for indie rock,” Julia Cumming says. A beat, then: “Maybe at NYU.” Cumming is college age—22, to be exact—but coursework is seldom on her mind, no exams to study for, no textbooks in the back of the Ford Transit she rides around in with bandmates Nick Kivlen and Jacob Faber. For a period of time, the space was populated with trash bags full of vintage clothing. “I have a Depression-era style way of collecting clothing,” Cumming says. But for now, the van has enough space for the three musicians in Sunflower Bean and their snack assortments.

Dan Deacon hasn’t slept well in a while. For the last year, empty dump trucks barrel by his Baltimore home every morning. It’s a noisy event for an otherwise quiet street.

“Paintings fall off the wall, it just scares the shit out of us,” he says. “I don’t know why the route that they’re on is our block but hopefully whatever they’re working on ends.”

Matt Scottoline has been thinking about the flow of his next album. His band, Hurry, is in the final stages of completing their upcoming full-length and he’s got an album opener in mind. It’s six minutes long.

“My instinct is to make that the opening track,” Scottoline says, “but the pragmatic side is saying don’t start with a six-minute, slow-burn song because people are going to be bored.”

He hasn’t consciously thought about frontloading the record, but he hasn’t not thought about it, either. Since it’s so easy to discover music via streaming services, Scottoline says, there’s the urge to begin the album with something hooky to help usher casual listeners into the rest of the collection and, hopefully, discography.

For as long as humankind has had access to technology, we’ve used it to feed into guilty pleasures, keep tabs on significant others, call out haters as we see fit, and post jealousy-inducing selfies. As the cultural landscape has shifted to a more digitally-focused society, the vernacular in popular music has morphed to reflect the access gadgets and the internet have offered. Despite existing in a talent echelon all her own, Beyonce has made a lyrical evolution in line with the technological advances seen worldwide. From the internet dissing days of Destiny’s Child to the notable absence of tech on Lemonade, Beyoncé has utilized the universality of the future, voyeurism and love in her lyrics.