VMP Magazine

In “Ghost Story,” a character tells the narrator: “You never stop to consider your own nature.” But on Pratfall, that’s exactly what Jackie Cohen is doing. 

“I thought I knew who I was up until I was like, 28. And then I found out, and that identity got obliterated,” Cohen said. “It is weird when you spend a little bit of time trying to figure out how you got banged up so bad, why you made the decisions that you made, and you realize that you’ve been making them your entire life.” 

Courtney Barnett is a master of the minute: She’s the type to see — and sing about — “soy linseed Vegemite crumbs” or a house’s relics (“The handrail in the shower / A collection of those canisters for coffee, tea and flour / And a photo of a young man in a van in Vietnam”). These verbose, pithy observations comprise entire stories, with their long, winding lines always threatening to overlap a chord or bump into each other.

Every week, we tell you about an album we think you need to spend time with. This week’s album is Stella Donnelly’s sophomore record, Flood.

“This record is made in the time of the Archons,” Nika Roza Danilova said, matter-of-factly. The Archons — Gnostic malevolent forces and rulers that corrupt humanity — are the namesake of her sixth full-length album as Zola Jesus. We live in an Archonic period, she said, because we have a “lot of rulers trying to manipulate and control humanity in a way that is nefarious and potentially very dangerous and destructive.”

Every week, we tell you about an album we think you need to spend time with. This week’s album is Farm to Table, the second record and 4AD debut from genre-bending indie rocker Bartees Strange.

When would the touring stop? Barrie Lindsay was getting tired. If you don’t actively take a break, she told me, “It’s just going to be shows forever.” She was touring with WHY? in fall 2019 when she made the conscious decision to get off the road for a while. She stayed in a family friend’s empty cottage near her parents’ house and gave herself permission to not write; primarily, to spend time with her family. Her father, who had cancer, had taken a turn: She wanted to be around him before that “final, traumatic” moment where her mom would say, “You have to come home now.” 

When she answers our Zoom call, Georgia Maq is taking her temperature: There was just a COVID-19 outbreak in the nursing ward where she works. She doesn’t seem too worried, but she’s on her way to take a test, too — she’d gladly take one daily, if it would help. 

“I have a gift, I've been told, for seeing what’s there,” Katie Crutchfield sings on “The Eye.” Her new album as Waxahatchee, Saint Cloud, is an exercise in that clarity. A follow-up to 2017’s Out in the Storm, an angry, punk breakup record, Saint Cloud flips the perspective from rage to reflection.

VMP Rising is our series where we partner with up-and-coming artists to press their music to vinyl and highlight artists we think are going to be the Next Big Thing. Today we’re featuring Low Grade Buzz, the debut LP from Australian trio Huntly. Low Grade Buzz is out on vinyl now in the VMP store right here, and you can read our interview with the group below.

Some people turn to ballads when they’re sad; Charly Bliss grab pop and hold tight.

Chill, dreamy pop band Barrie began as a blind date. Singer and musician Barrie Lindsay was living in Boston when Joe Van Moyland reached out: He’d heard her music online and wanted to set her up in a band. He knew two guys at The Lot, a Brooklyn-based radio station run out of a reused shipping container, who he thought would be a great fit for her sound.

What if a company offered you a better body and a better mind, and all you had to do was call? How much — and what — would it cost you? Would it be worth it? These questions unnerve Nilüfer Yanya, and serve as the framing device for her debut full-length album Miss Universe, out next week, and streaming on NPR right now.

Photos by Elijah Lee Taylor

In Inside Listening, a new series from VMP, we’ll be holding up a lens to the sacred listening spaces of various vinyl collectors from all over, one collection at a time.

In honor of his new album, Quietly Blowing It, which is out June 25, we took a visual tour through the personal listening space of MC Taylor (Hiss Golden Messenger), as Taylor gave us a track-by-track breakdown of the new record.

In “Drunken Widow’s Waltz,” Renée Reed memorializes her grandparents in Cajun French. Crunchy and evoking a toy box accordion, the song also investigates her own desire: to live a simple life like theirs.

In Sylvan Esso, a song starts as a feeling: sound comes after. Duo Amelia Meath and Nick Sanborn value honesty above all when they write — a “human moment” to ground every song. Speaking from the woods near their recording studio outside of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, their words sometimes get lost among bird calls and wind, utterly fitting for a band that, as Sanborn says, loves “records where the place the album was made feels like a deep layer in the record itself.”

Working in isolation, there’s no background noise. Or at least, there’s less than you’re probably used to.

Praising Hop Along’s 2015 album Painted Shut, Jillian Mapes wrote, “Listening to Frances Quinlan fray her vocals is like watching someone rip a gnarly run in their black tights.” If Hop Along reflects that torn brutality, then Quinlan’s solo effort Likewise is the gradual unraveling of the tights’ threads, a tear slowly widening into a gash. Likewise is tough and tender: ethereal in its imagery, but absolute in its craving for connection.

Lætitia Tamko’s Vagabon begins and ends with a full moon in Gemini. When I mention that Gemini Moon “leads with the thinking mind, even when talking about feelings,” she laughs; she just, literally, wrote the song on a full moon in Gemini. All the same, she admires the resonance of this second meaning.