By: Kayleigh Drake  In May of this year, my band had the absolute pleasure of opening for the immensely talented Birmingham musician Joshua Holt, aka Brotha Josh, at our inimitable local space-themed venue Saturn. It was such a fun night for a multitude of reasons, not the least of which being the fact that Josh and his band covered the quintessential millennial anthem “Electric Feel” by MGMT, which got every […]

By: Kayleigh Drake Two years ago, a five-piece band from Indianapolis released an album so perfect it still hasn’t left my regular music rotation. That album was called Triple Seven, and that band was called Wishy.  I loved Triple Seven so much that I got it on the holy trinity of hard copy formats: CD, cassette and vinyl. (Two of which I scooped at our fabulous local music emporium Seasick […]

By: Jackie Lo It’s been a while since a song stopped me in my tracks, and “I Want You” by Beck Zegans did just that. I stopped scrolling through songs immediately and thought: I need to know who Beck Zegans is. I need to know what the rest of this album sounds like. Engraving of Armor released Friday on Exploding in Sound Records, and I’ve been loving this nine-song album, […]

By: Kayleigh Drake  I first heard of TV Star a couple years ago through what is probably my favorite compilation of all time: From Far It All Seems Small: A Compilation From Seattle’s Underground. It was released on KR Records, which is the label that Mark Palm from Supercrush owns and operates, and it consists of 14 songs from bands I was largely unfamiliar with prior to listening. Since Seattle […]

By: Kayleigh Drake  At this point, it should be absolutely no secret that I’m a shoegaze fan. (Please see exhibits A, B, C and D.) So, when I hear about a brand-new shoegaze album being released, I’m drawn to it like a moth to a flame.  Enter Glidewinder, the second full-length album from San Diego’s self-billed “truegaze” band Sparkler. It just dropped on Friday, April 10, and when I say […]

By: Kayleigh Drake  Joder Juan is a band that brings back a really nice memory for me. I first heard them during one of my very first radio shifts at Substrate, back in January of 2025. I was queuing up my playlist for the evening, and in the moments before my show started, their song “Analisis del Desgaste” played in our station rotation. I had never heard of either the […]

By: Jackie Lo I’ve long admired Kim Gordon, from her days of Sonic Youth to Free Kitten, X-Girl, Body/Head, to showing me how you can successfully have a long career of playing music in a band with your partner, to doing your own things without them after they are gone even while your heart is broken and I’ve loved watching her solo career with these last three albums. We share […]

By: Kayleigh Drake Y’all know I love to see a fellow Southern band kicking ass. And that’s one of many reasons why I’m digging the heck out of this new Cashier EP. Cashier being the four-piece band from Lafayette, Louisiana, who just released a six-songer, “The Weight,” on Julia’s War Recordings last week. (As in, the iconic Philly-based label founded by Doug Dulgarian from TAGABOW.) And it has been in […]

By: Kayleigh Drake I’m a simple girl. I like sunsets, long walks and bands with wall-of-sound guitars. So it only makes sense that I’m a Nothing fan.  Nothing, as in the five-piece shoegaze band with a self-professed “un-Googleable name,” based out of Philadelphia, but which features our very own local Birmingham musician, Cam Smith (also of Ladder to God and Cloakroom), on guitar.  They just dropped their fifth studio album, […]