Five years since her debut album Delivery, Mikaela Davis has moved away from her hometown of Rochester, shared the stage with the likes of Bob Weir, Phil Lesh, Christian McBride, Bon Iver, Lake Street Dive and Circles Around the Sun and entered a new decade. But it’s the ever-evolving relationships between her closest friends and bandmates that has propelled the Hudson Valley-based artist onto her latest album And Southern Star––a truly collaborative effort that ruminates on the choices we make, and the people we always come back to.

Mi'ens is a mathy noise rock duo from Vancouver, Canada, founded in 2012. Experimental, with a side of sparklepop. Mi'ens is the female-fronted shredding of Kim Glennie on guitar/loops/Moog, backed by the polyrhythmic blastbeats of Evan Heggen on drums. Their unique brand of math noise consists of live loops, layered textural guitar and effects, the warm, analog drone of the Moog, coupled with well-placed vocalizations, all atop breakneck beats. Mi'ens veers into the territory of art rock/post rock on their latest, Future Child, a follow up to 2017's Challenger, their 2014 LP experimentalsparklenoisepop and the 2013 demo EP Mi’ens. Mi'ens has toured the US, UK and Canada, and has opened for Tera Melos, Elephant Gym, LITE and Drug Apts. “Virtuosic and chaotic soundscapes.” "Reminiscent of Hella or Don Cab." "Complex conversational playing." "Trippy as fuck."1. Future Child 2. French Disko 3. Charge Dodger 4. Nu11 Set5. Rifft Valley6. Bolshevik Brunch7. Ice Cream Ponies8. Mondlandung Cat. No. KRS663Release date: September 25, 2020

With its “personal is political” lyrics read straight from our collective diary, Bratmobile’s full-length debut delivers 28 minutes of fury, fun and D.I.Y. punk, making Pottymouth one of riot grrrl’s most defining albums.

Equal parts sass, snark and surf-punk infused guitar, Bratmobile’s third album bursts with catchy hooks and thought-provoking critiques of their scene, consumerism and the patriarchy. It's clear what Bratmobile was busy doing in '02: creating the most brutally honest anthems brimmed with the defiant punk attitude the original grrrl gang is known for.

Brooklyn's Habibi brought an explosive and celebratory fun to their self-titled 2014 debut. That brief collection was overflowing with bubblegum melodies, upbeat pop, and the kind of giddy excitement that bands only revel in during their earliest stages. Six years later, sophomore album Anywhere But Here retains some of that excitement, but sees the band expanding into moodier expression, more complex songwriting, and an expanded instrumentation that includes occasional Middle Eastern touches. This kind of progression was hinted at on the band's 2018 EP Cardamom Garden, which saw them incorporating Persian hand percussion and lyrics sung in Farsi into shadowy rock tunes. Anywhere But Here splits its track list between higher-energy power pop songs like the attitude-heavy "Misunderstood" and more simmering, downtempo slow burns like "Flowers." On the moodier songs, spindly surf-rock guitar leads blur into reverb-coated vocal harmonies. The relaxed pace and sun-dazed atmosphere of "Angel Eyes" sounds like the Allah-Las at their most subdued, but before long, Habibi calls on the jittery fire of their earliest material for the dancey garage pop of "Bad News." Both Habibi's pop-friendly and atmospheric sides grow on Anywhere But Here, with more direct hooks on songs like "Hate Everyone But You" and a daring willingness to explore outside of their known parameters on songs like album-closer "Come My Habibi." Along with auxiliary percussion from a tombak player, the song finds a droning riff stretching into a psychedelic workout, taking the band further out than they've ventured before. Being able to break new, more serious ground without losing any of the pop core that made the band so fun to begin with is the album's key strength. Anywhere But Here not only has some of Habibi's most adventurous songs, but also some of their best yet.

Sonically, there are a few things we got right in the 90’s–stompy rage fueled queer bands, hazy uber-pedaled guitar, poeticism to be yelled full chested towards the windshields of our 2nd (or 3rd, or 4th) hand vehicles. More generally, there was also a lot we got wrong. Sarah Shook’s new solo project, Mightmare, finds a way to roll the sounds we couldn’t live without into a response to the things we couldn’t live with, confronting their habits and the rules they live by in the process. Loved for their work in Sarah Shook and the Disarmers, Shook’s Cruel Liars brings crispy clean, country twanged vocals to the table alongside the furiously urgent need to express themselves. The record marks the process of finding meaning in spaces outside of gender or drinking or protocol, and slingshots itself towards something both conceptually remarkable and a simply exhilarating, embodied knockout.