VMP Magazine

1. Vinyl Me, Please Gift Subscription ($99-299) The holidays just sound better on vinyl. Vinyl Me, Please offers gift plans for periods of three mo...

In December, the VMP Essentials Record of the Month is the 15th anniversary edition of Neon Indian’s delightfully lo-fi, chillwave-pioneering debut, Psychic Chasms. On occasion of our reissue, VMP chatted with Alan Palomo about how Neon Indian came to be, reflections on Psychic Chasms, his synthesizer collection, Italo disco, and much more.

VMP Rising is our series where we celebrate up-and-coming bands and put their music on vinyl, often for the first time ever. Our newest VMP Rising artist is Khadija Al Hanafi, whose albums Slime Patrol and Slime Patrol 2 are in our store now.

VMP Rising is our series where we celebrate up-and-coming bands and put their music on vinyl, often for the first time ever. Our newest VMP Rising ...

John Prine is the comedian who can make a room dissolve in laughter without getting mean or going blue. John Prine is wry without being cynical, tender without being sentimental; simple but not simplistic, basic but not boring. He is deeply empathetic, able to tell a character’s story without turning it into a platform for his own thoughts and beliefs—yet you can always feel his presence in his songs, like Hitchcock appearing as an extra in his films. John Prine can shrewdly pinpoint and thoughtfully describe life’s myriad absurdities and hardships but does so in a way that’s whimsical and humble, not weighty or self-involved. His is a talent that’s simultaneously easy to describe and hard to pin down—and it can be easy to miss the depth and dimension hidden in his songs.

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 the debut release from Cleo Reed, Root Cause.

VMP Rising is our series where we celebrate up-and-coming bands and put their music on vinyl, often for the first time ever. Our newest VMP Rising artist is Bruiser and Bicycle, whose sophomore album, Holy Red Wagon, is in our store now.

In October and November, Vinyl Me, Please flew me to Atlanta, Memphis, and Nashville to interview artists and writers for the fourth season of the Vinyl Me, Please Anthology Podcast, this one centered around Stax Records. When I was putting my list of artist requests together, there was one artist I wanted to talk to, but not just for what he could tell me about one of the records in our Stax Records box set (Hold On I'm Comin' in this case): David Porter.

VMP Rising is our series where we celebrate up-and-coming bands and put their music on vinyl, often for the first time ever. Our newest VMP Rising artist is Blvck Svm, whose album jetsvm, produced by Pilotkid, is in our store now. 

When Stax Records closed up shop for good in the late ’70s, David Porter was the last captain steering the legendary soul music ship. After bankruptcy and a lack of national distribution forced the label to close in 1975, Porter was hired by Fantasy Records — which bought Stax from bankruptcy court — to run the label as an on-going concern. Porter was the perfect man for the job; with Isaac Hayes, he’d written songs, produced and A&R’d Sam & Dave records, and songs for basically all of Stax’s first wave. When Hayes became Stax’s biggest star of its second wave, Porter also had a woefully underrated run of solo records — Victim Of The Joke is one of the five best albums ever on Stax, in this writer’s opinion — but also became Stax’s de facto producer and in-house A&R, helming projects for everyone from the Emotions to the Bar-Kays. When Fantasy realized Porter intended to bring Stax back to its former glory, rather than plumb the Otis Redding catalog over and over, via releasing chart smashes from groups like the Bar-Kays, Fantasy more or less closed the book on Stax being a current label. 

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 the deluxe edition of Freelance from Brooklyn-born rapper Ben Reilly. 

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 Amindi’s debut EP, nice. 

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 a compilation from Project Traction, Project Traction Vol. 1.

Picture it: It’s SXSW 2019, and Ric Wilson takes the stage at the Empire Control Room & Garage as part of the VMP Rising Showcase. He performs and starts a Soul Train line (the “best fucking Soul Train,” according to Wilson.) Four years, a pandemic shutdown and a stint in London later, VMP and Wilson reunited at the same venue ahead of his afternoon set to catch up on how his career, art and creative process have changed since that Soul Train line.

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 Annahstasia’s debut EP, Revival. 

At the end of the second track and single from Anna Wise’s latest record, Subtle Body Dawn, there’s a recurring note, a deliberately repeated piano key, reminiscent of soothing meditation music. It is impossible to listen to “The Now” without feeling rooted in the moment by the firmly repeated “welcome to the now” in the lyrics and reiterated note in the outro. Similarly, when I speak with Wise via Zoom — joining from California, where she’s been spending time in the sun and the ocean with her family — the conversation is grounded and present. This is the first interview Wise has given about her new project. She begins with a singsong “hi,” inviting in her warmth and excitement that remains for the entire call.

La Maison Noir / The Black House, the long awaited new release from world pop craftsman Petite Noir is out today, and you can grab a Vinyl Me, Please exclusive variant of the album in our store right now.

Below, you can read an interview with Petite Noir about representation in pop, working with Danny Brown, and his approach to his genre-bending music.

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.”

An instinct to impose a flat surface over a multi-dimensional reality has been a source of human error since the beginning of time. Resisting that instinct is where magic happens.

Tennis have had a lot of flat surfaces placed over their reality, basically since they debuted in 2011. And it’s easy to see why; Tennis are easy to romanticize. A beautiful, young married couple that sails around the world in seemingly unattainable luxury, writing dream-worthy indie rock, being madly in love, waking up with perfect hair? It has to be straight out of a 1940s romance. Tennis’ shiny seafoam surface practically breeds easy misconceptions about who they are or what their music is. But to apply neat and tidy storybook tropes to real human beings would be to miss the boat on Tennis completely.

Marissa Paternoster, singer and guitarist for New Jersey punk trio Screaming Females, says that when she was in high school, listening to sad songs made her feel better. One might suspect the same would be true for nearly everyone in high school. It’s a peculiar paradox: Why would listening to mopey, minor key tunes comfort us? For many, the endorphin rush of emotion is purifying. We’re socialized to grin and conceal our defeats, so since we can’t express our sadness, indulging it with sad music is a healing practice. But the practice has more purpose than self-pity. These songs quietly corroborate and substantiate our pain.

“You know when you hear M.O.P.’s Ante Up and you wanna punch somebody in the face? Well, this is the song that makes you want to put on your Gucci socks.”

Sylvan Esso’s Amelia Meath and Nick Sanborn didn’t set out to make their fourth studio album earlier this year. The duo drove from their home in North Carolina to Los Angeles for the 64th Annual Grammy Awards — their third album, Free Love, was nominated for Best Dance/Electronic Music Album — but the award show was postponed, which left them in a small rental house with a makeshift recording studio and unexpected time to make new music. 

The result, No Rules Sandy, is an album focused on connection, created with a freedom and looseness unlike any Sylvan Esso project before it. Fittingly, when I met with Meath and Sanborn to talk about the record, it worked out to do so in person, seated around a table in a dark leather- and oak-clad Lower East Side hotel lobby. Our meeting came just days after the band’s multiple performances at the Newport Folk Festival — including debuting the full new album live. Amid asides about salt-boiled potatoes and astrological compatibility, I spoke with the duo about writing and producing No Rules Sandy, surprising each other and breaking their own rules.

“I really think that I need to calm down,” Jackie Hayes chants in her pillow-punching Over & Over single “Focus.” Per the LP’s circular title, such anxious sentiments tend to resurface on the Chicago singer-songwriter’s 10-song LP, which is a coming-of-age portrait of an early 20-something learning how to sit with herself. “I had a lot of these self-imposed thoughts about self-sabotage,” the 23-year-old artist says of writing Over & Over. “That was something that I struggled with for a really long time, and I still do to a degree. I was feeling very insecure about all aspects of my life, whether it’s my personal relationships, how I come across to people, my looks, my career.”

Over the course of a career that spanned a little under 20 years, Ivy established themselves as one of the most polished indie bands around. The New York City trio — Andy Chase, Dominique Durand and the late Adam Schlesinger — excelled at crafting urbane pop with plush synths, honeyed guitars and subtle rhythmic grooves. Durand’s stylish vocals, which often boasted a hint of a French accent, anchored the music.

Meechy Darko believes in the law of attraction. On his debut solo album, Gothic Luxury, he summons Basquiats and brimstone with a gravelly rasp that’s become synonymous with psychedelic hip-hop. As one-third of Flatbush Zombies, he’s spent the better half of the last decade living a rockstar lifestyle, coveted by crowds and camera lenses. The glow from the eye of a spotlight paints Meechy Darko as one of the lucky few, but lights cast long shadows.   

“I think being unique is more important than being good,” Nnamdi Ogbonnaya — best known by the mononym NNAMDÏ — tells me over Zoom from his bedroom in Chicago. Luckily, NNAMDÏ is both. Since 2013, he’s toyed with hip-hop, pop, jazz and indie rock to create an avant-garde yet fun-loving blend. And in the meantime, he’s been an ever-present figure in the Chicago DIY scene, building a cult following for his own music and helping like-minded artists release theirs with his record label, Sooper Records. 

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 Topaz Jones’ breakout sophomore album, Don’t Go Tellin’ Your Momma (which shares a title with its companion piece, Jones’ critically acclaimed short film).

Like many of us, Seth Nyquist found himself thinking more deeply about the passage of time over the course of the pandemic. The Toronto-born songwriter and producer’s new album Semblance — his full-length debut as MorMor after building considerable momentum on the heels of immaculate, genre-blurring gems like “Heaven’s Only Wishful,” “Whatever Comes to Mind” and “Outside” — traces a path from “Dawn” to “Days End.” The album follows Nyquist on an introspective journey from the dissolution of “a love that wasn’t true” to being at peace with a lifetime of unpredictable tides, as he narrates in spoken word on the gentle closer “Quiet Heart.” Aching but clear-headed, Semblance is a moving portrait of, as Nyquist himself describes it, “what is important to me, knowing that you only have a finite amount of time.”

“It was all a hypothetical until you’re actually standing on the platform and you have to jump, and then you’re like, ‘Oh no, I've made a huge mistake,’” remembers Elizabeth Stokes, guitarist and lead singer of Aotearoa (New Zealand) guitar pop band The Beths. The music video shoot for the group’s single “Knees Deep” found Stokes bungee-corded by the ankles to a bridge about 130 feet over the waters of Waitematā Harbour, poised for the drop. “I think I was saying ‘I don't wanna do it’ right up until the moment that I let myself fall off,” she says. Or, as she puts it in the song’s shout-worthy chorus: “The shame! I wish I was brave enough to dive in.”

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.” 

VMP called up the restless artist as she shares the influences behind her original soundtrack for the new open-world adventure, Sable, and how the experience was a pleasant departure from writing for her main gig as Japanese Breakfast.

On the morning of February 23, 2009, the French indie pop band Phoenix did what very few non-Radiohead bands were doing at the time: They gave away the lead single to their upcoming album, Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix, for free. In the world before streaming, when 99-cent iTunes downloads were the currency of the land, this move was radical. Handing over the lead single of your upcoming album to anyone who wanted a copy, free and clear?

But it paid off. Listeners were immediately left rapt by the glitzy, fuzz-filled vibe of the new track that sounded something like a perfect marriage between the shiny pop sensibilities of groups like Of Montreal and the scuzzy, rock aesthetic of the Strokes. “We had been gone for something like three years, so we didn't really have high hopes,” Phoenix’s frontman Thomas Mars said recently via phone, speaking on behalf of the band, which now lives around the world. “We thought people might've forgotten us a little bit.”

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.

Whitney’s Forever Turned Around, the band’s 2019 sophomore album, projected a sturdy, reassuring veneer of reliability. The Chicago duo, comprised of Julien Ehrlich and Max Kakacek, formed after the dissolution of their previous band, Smith Westerns, and broke through with their debut album, 2016’s Light Upon the Lake. Lake is a breed of rock record that is currently approaching extinction: 1970s-style, golden-hued soft rock seemingly designed to soundtrack tranquil Sunday mornings. It exuded a warm familiarity without sounding quite like anything else circulating in the indie rock sphere at that time. Forever Turned Around recognized that the formula was a winning one; the album did everything its predecessor did, and just as skillfully.  

Divino Niño’s fourth album, Last Spa on Earth, conjures up the thrill of a dreamy, forbidden crush. Making the record was sort of a reciprocal experience for the Chicago band, who were in the midst of chaos and uncertainty. “We were in a Wisconsin cabin in the middle of the pandemic … it was so cold and snowing the whole time,” recalls vocalist/guitarist Camilo Medina. They were “drinking and making music until 4 a.m.” every day, he says, “Then JV started playing some spa-like keyboards … and Guillermo blurted out, ‘The last spa on Earth.’ It felt so apocalyptic what we were experiencing in that cabin, like the last moment.”

Everyone thinks they want authenticity, but in actuality, what’s presented to us as honest and raw — endless social media stories, reality shows, six-hour livestreams — is actually preened over and manicured. The musician Oliver Sim recognizes this: It’s why his terrific debut album, Hideous Bastard, is all about how honesty is relative. How it changes over time in our minds, how it’s liberating to some but terrifying to others, and how it’s sometimes best consumed with a chaser of artifice.

“It’s about the journey, not the destination” is one of those treacly quotes that we’ve heard so many times it can make your skin bristle. So leave it to Julia Jacklin, one of our shrewdest, smartest songwriters, to breathe new life into the tired mantra. Written in fits and starts during the last few years and largely recorded over a few months in Montreal, the Melbourne-based musician’s third album, PRE PLEASURE, focuses on dismantling the notion that work and enjoyment are separate, both personally and professionally.

“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.”

A bunch of grapes, one banana, two strawberries and a pineapple made out of papier-mâché; noises created by shoes, gravel, string, a shoelace, nylon shorts and a water bottle; yodeling, covers, traditionals and one original song: These are the main components, big and small, that went into The A’s debut, Fruit.

The A’s in question — Sylvan Esso’s Amelia Meath and Daughter of Swords’ Alexandra Sauser-Monnig — are longtime friends and members of Mountain Man (alongside Molly Sarlé). They first performed as a duo in 2013, but the project got its start even before then; when I spoke with Meath and Sauser-Monnig on the phone, they both traced The A’s beginnings back to those early Mountain Man days.

Since debuting with Die Midwestern in 2020, Arlo McKinley has quickly become one of the more exciting voices on the fringes of country music. The Cincinnati native was the final artist John Prine signed to his Oh Boy Records label before his passing in 2020, about as powerful a co-sign as a singer-songwriter could get. Die Midwestern introduced McKinley as an artist capable of not only Prine-approved songwriting but crafting a singular country sound that is as informed by the late icon as it is punk acts like Black Flag and Social Distortion, something McKinley takes even further on his newly released sophomore album, This Mess We’re In.

“Cast some light and you’ll be alright” repeats José González in “Crosses,” a standout track on his debut LP, Veneer — an album that came out in 2003 (internationally in 2005). The Sweden-born Argentinian singer-songwriter was perhaps one of the more unlikely candidates for global troubadour; he was raised in Gothenburg, Sweden, by two academics who fled Argentina in 1976 following a military coup, and was well on his way through a PhD in biochemistry when the guitar tempted its way into his hands. González’s playing style is its own quiet-yet-deeply-impactful beast: Inspired early on by bossa nova and Silvio Rodríguez, among others, González also spent many years playing in a hardcore band — the intensity of which still seeps into his current work. 

Something special happens when old friends grow up without growing apart — something that sounds like The Long Way, The Slow Way, the first Camp Trash LP. Now in their 30s, singer Bryan Gorman and guitarist Keegan Bradford have been building a songwriting rapport in and out of bands since they met in high school in Southwest Florida, going on 15 years ago. Even as Bradford’s moved from the Sunshine State to Virginia, China and now Portland, Oregon, the two still spend hours on the phone going line by line, trading verses and debating what each song needs. “I’ve simply never considered writing music without Bryan,” Keegan told me in an email after Camp Trash released their pop-punk-leaning debut EP, Downtiming, last year. “It’s my favorite way to write music.”

When Bartees Strange hops onto the Zoom call, he’s in a New York cab heading for Penn Station, where he’ll have to rush to make his train back home to DC. The week after it’s the record release party in LA for his new, second album, Farm to Table. Over the last couple years, since he released his 2020 debut Live Forever and the live music industry has begun to open up, he’s become the most in-demand opening act in indie rock — hitting massive venues with the likes of Phoebe Bridgers, Lucy Dacus, Courtney Barnett and Car Seat Headrest. He also signed to 4AD, home to his heroes The National (a nice full-circle moment, since he began his journey as Bartees Strange with a National covers EP, Say Goodbye to Pretty Boy).

Vermont-based musician and producer James Hinton, aka The Range, has returned with his first record in six years, Mercury. To celebrate the new release, The Range spoke with VMP via email about making his latest record, sample discovery and his Mercury-inspired home listening mix.

Adrian Quesada is putting a new twist on a classic genre. The Black Pumas musician is bringing back Latin America’s balada movement from the ’60s and ’70s in his upcoming album Boleros Psicodélicos. Like he’s done in most of his past projects, Quesada weaves in his bicultural influences from growing up near the Texas and Mexico border. While crate digging in Mexico City, he talked with VMP about his finds and how those artists influenced his new LP.

Over the course of his nearly three-decade long career, Andrew Bird has formed a creative process around live performance. Like a comedian trying out new jokes on a crowd, he has often experimented with improvisation and half-finished songs on stage, just to see how they feel with an audience. “It wasn’t that I really wanted anyone’s specific feedback,” Bird said from home in Los Angeles. “Just the sense of some sort of dialogue that was outside of my head is important.”

VMP connected with acclaimed composer, singer, visual artist and MacArthur Genius Grant winner Cécile McLorin Salvant to answer your questions about her career, her body of work and her most recent album, Ghost Song. 

Spell 31 was born out of a few primordial spells recast during a music session held by Ibeyi, the French Afro-Cuban duo, 27, comprised of sisters Lisa-Kaindé and Naomi Diaz. Sacred scriptures like The Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead and The Tibetan Book of the Dead made their way to the twins’ consciousness the same day they began crafting the early songs for their upcoming full-length release, produced by Richard Russell. “I jumped for joy and screamed ‘That is magic!’” Lisa-Kaindé said. “It’s about the connection to that knowledge, to those truths and to that power. Protected by the spells, we were ready to dive into our third album by connecting to that power and channeling that magic.”

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 Playroom, the debut LP from lo-fi alt-R&B artist Nathan Bajar. Playroom is out on vinyl now in the VMP store, and you can read our interview with him below.

Photos by Harshvardhan Shah.

In January 2020, Kevin Morby watched his father collapse in the middle of family dinner. That night, still gripped with shock, Morby waited to hear more. He passed the time in the basement of his childhood home, flipping through old family photographs, images that resonated with him more in this moment than they could have on any ordinary day. One particular photo grabbed him: his father as a young man, posing shirtless, looking invincible, roughly the same age as Morby was in that moment. Just hours earlier he had watched as the same man was hauled away by an ambulance, his future uncertain. It was a contrast that jolted Morby and stirred questions about growing up, getting old and staring down the concept of mortality.