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food house is a 2-person frenetic internet supergroup composed of Fraxiom and gupi. The pair bonded while both living in (and despising) Fraxiom's home state of Massachusetts, one the many topics of 'Thos Moser', their first collaboration and smash hit first release on Dylan Brady's Dog Show Records. Their self-titled album is crammed full of pop culture references and obscure inside jokes but resonates much deeper than its surface-level silliness through gupi's expansive, addictive instrumentals and Fraxiom's earnest and unapologetic lyrical perspective.

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Made up of Rory Trobbiani and Luke Scott, HighSchool create intoxicating music, whose debut 2021 EP Forever At Last is a lo-fi gem of the genre. Championed by the likes of NME, The FADER, CLASH, DIY, PAPER, Rolling Stone AU, The Line of Best Fit, So Young and more, the band recently announced their signing to [PIAS] Australia alongside the release of latest single ‘August 19’.

Relocating to London last year, HighSchool have previously joined the likes of Wet Leg, CHVRCHES, NewDad and Mandy, Indiana on tour before playing a summer of UK festivals including All Points East, End of the Road, The Great Escape, Manchester Pysch Festival, Sea Change, Standon Calling and Visions. The autumn brought their first headline shows, both in the UK and across Europe, promoting not only their EP but also their anthemic track ‘Only a Dream’, released as a limited 7” on Dan Carey’s ever-great Speedy Wunderground label.

With Rory’s sister Lilli Trobbiani staying back to complete her studies, they returned to London to start work on their second EP, basing themselves out of a practice space in Peckham. Ahead of their first-ever headline tour and to start a summer tun of festivals, they released ‘Colt’, their most dancefloor-friendly track yet that had brilliant splashes of electro and Italo-disco added to their new wave mix. It also had a great accompanying video, shot in Rome with a vainglorious Rory mingling among the sights and bemused tourists.

Known for directing their own incredible videos, they continue the escapism theme of previous single ‘Colt’ with a clip shot in Benidorm, the popular Spanish tourist destination known for its sandy beaches and trashy nightlife. They follow a fish-out-of-water protagonist while he gets ready to go out on the bustling neon-lit streets, showing the disparity between expectation and reality - a concept that runs throughout their upcoming Accelerator EP.

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Allegra Krieger is an American songwriter living and working in New York City. ‘I Keep My Feet on the Fragile Plane – Allegra’s fourth record and her first with Double Double Whammy – is her most mature and alluring work yet. It contains all the signatures of her best lyricism: delicate and precise phrasings, moments that flicker between beauty and banality, meaning that forms through the accretion of observations, memories, and unexpected adages.’

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Scream formed in 1979. Drummer Kent Stacks, bassist Skeeter Enoch Thompson and the brothers Pete and Franz Stahl attended school together in Bailey’s Crossroads, Virginia, when they began to discover the punk and new wave scene in DC and the provocative power of making music. Like most of the punk bands in DC, they were influenced by the Bad Brains, but their rock and roll sensibilities set them apart. In 1982, they went into Inner Ear Studio with Ian MacKaye and Eddie Janney to record Dischord's first full length album, Still Screaming.

Scream followed this with a second full length album, This Side Up, in 1984. The band toured throughout the US and were one of the first US hardcore bands to tour Europe and the UK. In 1987, they released Banging the Drum, which was recorded at both Southern Studios in London and Inner Ear. In 1988, No More Censorship was released on reggae label RAS records. Scream returned to Dischord to release Fumble in 1993.

They made a few line-up changes along the way, including the addition of their friend Harley Davidson on second guitar, and, when Kent Stacks left the band to start a family, they asked a young local drummer, Dave Grohl, to take over. After a number of years with "the Scream team," Dave went on to join Nirvana and form The Foo Fighters. In 1996, at a Christmas reunion show, Kent Stacks returned as Scream’s drummer; the show was recorded and released as the CD “Live at the Black Cat.” Over the next few years, everyone branched out in different directions – Franz joined the Foo Fighters for a short period and Pete played with Goatsnake and earthlings? The band returned as a unit, with Clint Walsh on second guitar, in 2011 to record the Complete Control Sessions, which was released as an EP on Side One Dummy and was, until now, the band’s most recent release.

Scream’s newest album, DC Special, will be released in the fall of 2023 on Dischord Records. For this record, Scream invited their extensive music community to help create a unique project that weaves the history of music in Washington DC into the story of the band. Recorded by Don Zientara just weeks before his studio was evicted from its longtime location, the record is rich with both the sounds of Inner Ear and those of friends and musicians who influenced Scream and who shaped DC music over the past six decades. DC Special embodies the same sense of community and politics that inspired Scream from the start and is a truly special collection of new music that speaks to the present and also tells the story of DC music, Scream, and the influences that shaped them.

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Home Counties reside in Bristol and combine angular guitar work with furious percussion. Born from the evolution of previous incarnation, Haze – a band that made a name for itself supporting the likes of Shame and Pip Blom – the 5-piece make melodically rigid, socially-charged anthems that are lyrically tongue-in-cheek and scathingly satirical.

The first taste of their sound comes from debut single ‘Redevelopment’ – a raucously danceable earworm that has already caught the attention of Huw Stephens (BBC Radio 1), Tom Robinson (BBC 6 Music) and MattWilkinson (Beats 1). The single also marks itself as the title track from the bands impending debut EP, produced by Theo Verney (Egyptian Blue, Fur).

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Bon Enfant’s been breaking the glass ceiling since their inception. Led by Daphné Brissette (Canailles) and Guillaume Chiasson (Solids, Ponctuation), along with Étienne Côté (Canailles, Lumière), Mélissa Fortin (Canailles) and Alex Burger (himself), this ragtag team of superheroes land with brilliance wherever they go. Their music is phantasmagoric, best enjoyed with a flower in your hair and a sword in hand.

Bon Enfant exploded onto the Quebec scene in the fall 2019 with their first LP – celebrated as one of the best francophone records of the year by multiple media outlets. Bon Enfant (the self-titled record) was an amalgam of groovy “Québécois” pop, covered in tie-dye, with disco, desert rock and some nancysinatra-ish influences. Songs co-written by Brissette and Chiasson, in French, but in a raw French – think Molière with a beard.

Their second enchantment, Diorama, hypnotized the public in 2021 invoking a new synergy and a broader sonic palette. The range of their mutated influences moved from the early 70’s to the late 70’s/early 80’s: Diverse and filled with a fantastical imagery, with naive disco and borrowing from hard and glam rock, Japanese pop and psych folk, while always dodging mimicry to put together their own brand of fluid and open “Québécois rock” or as it is known here, “rock québ”. The writing, big and labored over, goes one way; the arrangements, idem, go elsewhere: a clash that opens countless doors. 

Bon Enfant still has a lot of dioramas to explore, accumulating 4 nominations at this year’s ADISQ gala (Quebec’s Grammys), including best rock record (which they won) and best band. They continue to feed the enchanted forest in which they attract the lost souls with their intoxicating musical ravings.

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Alynda Segarra is 36, or a little less than halfway through the average American lifespan. In that comparatively brief time, though, the Hurray for the Riff Raff founder has been something of a modern Huck Finn, an itinerant traveler whose adventures prompt art that reminds us there are always other ways to live.

Born in the Bronx and of Puerto Rican heritage, Segarra was raised there by a blue-collar aunt and uncle, as their father navigated Vietnam trauma and their mother neglected them to work for the likes of Rudy Giuliani. They were radicalized before they were a teenager, baptized in the anti-war movement and galvanized in New York’s punk haunts and queer spaces. At 17, Segarra split, becoming the kid in a communal squat before shuttling to California, where they began crisscrossing the country by hopping trains. They eventually found home—spiritual, emotional, physical—in New Orleans, forming a hobo band and realizing that music was not only a way to share what they’d learned and seen but to learn and see more. Hurray for the Riff Raff steadily rose from house shows to a major label, where Segarra became a pan-everything fixture of the modern folk movement. But that yoke became a burden, prompting Segarra to make the probing and poignant electronic opus, 2022’s Life on Earth, their Nonesuch debut. Catch your breath, OK? We’re back to 36, back to now.

During the last dozen years, these manifold tales of Segarra’s voyages have shaped an oral folklore of sorts, with the teenage vagabonding or subsequent trainhopping becoming what some may hear about Hurray for the Riff Raff before hearing the music itself. Segarra has dropped tidbits in songs, too, but they always worried that their experiences were too radical, that memories of dumpster diving or riding through New Orleans with a dildo dangling on an antenna were too much. But on The Past Is Still Alive, Segarra finally tells the story themselves, speckling stirring reflections on love, loss, and the end or evolution of the United States with foundational scenes from their own life.

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Bubbling up from the psychedelic tar pits of L.A., Frankie and the Witch Fingers have been a constant source of primordial groove for the better part of the last decade. Formed and incubated in Bloomington, IN before moving west to scrap with Los Angeles’ garage rock rabble, the band evolved from cavern-clawed echo merchants to architects of prog-infected psych epics that evoke a shift in reality. After a stretch on Chicago/LA flagship Permanent Records the band landed at yet another fabled enclave of garage and psychedelia – Brooklyn’s Greenway Records, now working in tandem with psych powerhouse LEVITATION and their label The Reverberation Appreciation Society, the group’s latest efforts are dually supported by a RAS / Greenway co-release.

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Ducks Ltd. make inviting and frenetic guitar pop for when life feels overwhelming. While the band’s songs are ostensibly breezy, a palpable anxiety boils underneath that communicates something deeper about everyday existence. On their latest album Harm’s Way, the Toronto duo of Tom McGreevy and Evan Lewis hones in on interpersonal and societal collapses, urban decay, and the near-impossibility of keeping a level head when everything around you seems to be falling apart.

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Children of Finland Fighting in Norway (C.O.F.F.I.N) are a four piece hard rock & roll band hailing from the ocean shores of Sydney, Australia, featuring a lead vocalist on drums. The band formed in 2005 as schoolmates influenced by a huge love for music, skateboarding and a good-times-all-the-time attitude. Since playing their first show at the age of 12 opening for The Hard-Ons at Manly Youth Centre, the band have meticulously carved out their own corner of hard biting Australian Rock n Roll.

C.O.F.F.I.N have gained a passionate following for their unique take on punk and rock music, gathering widespread acclaim for their energetic and addictive live shows combined with their lyrical activism and howling guitars. It has brought them hundreds of gigs over the years, headline tours, and numerous festival appearances. They’ve toured and shared the stage with many world renown bands such as Rose Tattoo, TSOL, Celibate Rifles, Dead Kennedys, Cosmic Psychos, Parkway Drive, Frenzal Rhomb, Misfits, Amyl and the Sniffers and the Hard Ons.

C.O.F.F.I.N have recorded and released four studio albums, one live album, and three EPs, all of which have sold out globally. Their most recent LP – the self-titled ‘Children Of Finland Fighting In Norway’ – released through Legless Records (AUS) and Erste Theke Tontraege Records (EU) in October 2020 is now in its 6th re-issue. 2022 has seen C.O.F.F.I.N tour the world in support of Amyl and The Sniffers, while also working hard on a new full length album for 2023.

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Kill yr idols is a new all dayer by this is tmrw highlighting alternative music. performing live:

bdrmm // bdrmm are a four-piece band based in Hull and Leeds. Musically, there are nods to The Cure, Deerhunter and DIIV,while the band reference RIDE and Radiohead. There are also echoes of krautrock and post-punk, from The Chameleons to Protomartyr, plus the proto-shoegaze of the Pale Saints’ ‘The Comforts Of Madness’.

model/actriz // Known for their pulsing blend of danceable noise, visceral post-punk, and a live performance that mirrors the way the record unravels, Model/Actriz is an experiment in the primal aspects of human experience.

Formed in Boston, the band draws on inspirations from a myriad of scenes, with lead singer Cole hailing from Delaware, and Jack and Ruben from Southern California. Yet there is a certain darkness that influences and permeates their music, reminiscent of the likes of Death Grips, Savages, and Lightening Bolt.

Their debut EP, AVA, threatens to burst at its own seams, with the trio paying homage to their love of noise, punk, and house music, an alchemical mixture of which turns much more volatile and terrifying than even those individual elements would lead to you to believe.

mock media // new Canadian supergroup comprised of Garnet Aronyk (Crack Cloud), Bennett Smith (N0V3L), Austin Boylan (Pottery) and Evan Aesen (Painted Fruits)

borough council // Merging elements of lo-fi and alternative rock, budding rock-trio Borough Council craft rhythmic lines both charismatic and compelling that might eventually come to define the band’s sound. The group hails Hastings, East Sussex, a seaside wonderland where the trio has already built a cult following with its feverish rock shows, surprise demos, and those lively-yet-understated rhythms that Borough Council is becoming known for.

the bill hell // based in the Black country, the big hell are a RELATIVELY new incarnation formed by seasoned musicians. the brain child of god damn frontman thom, this trio is ever powerful, combining their loud, fuzzed out guitars with thundering basslines and noisy screams.

doors at 3pm - early birds sold out

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For The Lovely Eggs being in a band is a way of life. It’s about art. It’s about creativity and expression. It’s about following your own path and doing things your own way.

Holly and David operate on their terms, spewing out music, records, art and television shows before piling in the van and tearing round the country to perform a load of live sold out shows.

Their wild and wilful independence sets themselves apart from other bands and despite having no management, booking agent, record label or publisher their recent album “I am Moron” shot to Number One in the Official UK Independent Charts and they continue to sell out shows across the country.

“I am Moron” bears the fruit of their second collaboration with Grammy award winning producer Dave Fridmann, their first being “This is Eggland” which was released in February 2018 to critical acclaim. In 2021, they collaborated with Godfather of Punk Iggy Pop on their single “I, Moron” and swiped the number one slot in both the Official U.K. Physical and Vinyl charts. Iggy Pop is a fan of the band and dedicated one of his BBC 6 Music shows to The Lovely Eggs’ work.

In 2023, Holly and David released their own TV show: EGGS TV, embarking on a televisual odyssey through alternative art, music, spoken word and underground culture. Teaming up with artist Casey Raymond, the 6 part YouTube series sucks you spiralling down the plughole into The Lovely Eggs’ distinctly off the wall universe, featuring guests Ian Mackaye, Gruff Rhys, Stewart Lee, John Grant, Cate le Bon, Maxine Peake, John Cooper Clarke, Space Lady, Pigs X 7, White Hills, Chris Packham and loads more.

With observational and often surreal lyrics, The Lovely Eggs have a powerful raw sound that creates the sonic illusion of a band twice their size. They have become known for their ferocious yet joyous live performances.

The band have just finished mixing a new album with Dave Fridmann and release their first single from it “My Mood Wave” on Feb 9, 2024. They look forward to a string of live UK shows in May 2024 to coincide with the album release.

Operating in a world when true authenticity is hard to find, The Lovely Eggs are one of the most exciting, innovative and genuine bands around. Welcome to their world. Welcome to Eggland.

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Miki Berenyi Trio are Miki Berenyi on vocals/guitar (Lush), Kevin ‘Moose’ McKillop on guitar (Moose) and Oliver Cherer (Gilroy Mere, Aircooled). The three musicians first worked together during Piroshka’s 2021 tour – Miki and Kevin being founder members, Oliver coming in on bass to replace Mick Conroy (Modern English) who had moved to the US. 

When the global pandemic made touring impossible, Miki spent the lockdown months writing her memoir, Fingers Crossed, released in 2022 to widespread acclaim. To provide some musical accompaniment for the string of book events and signings, Miki Berenyi Trio was formed.

 The band has developed a momentum of its own, touring with the Wedding Present and Gang of Four and sold out London co-headline show with Aircooled. Miki Berenyi Trio  are planning to record and release an album in 2024.

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Mock Tudors is the latest band from Tom Diffenthal (Family Selection Box, Mr Ben & the Bens), Ben Hall (Mr Ben & the Bens) and Richard Birkin (Hot Souls). Combining a power-pop knack for a hook with a bombastic stage presence that subverts the excesses of glam, the Tudors stumbled onto the pub stages of Sheffield in early 2021 and have barely got down since.

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Here to remind us of our insatiable, adolescent appetite for music, Art Brut are back together.

 What started as a break-up album and turned into an ‘in-love record’, ‘Wham! Bang! Pow! Let’s Rock Out!’ is a collection of post-punk, poppy bangers that recall the distinctive sound that burst out of the Berlin-based band back in 2005. It’s been seven years since the group’s last LP and sees Argos’ self-referential, sincere narrative shape into poignant reflections of encompassing a youthful heart in a world that perpetually forces us to grow up.

Argos was careful to “live a life” before attempting a new album. “I moved to Berlin, I nearly died with Peritonitis. I was in hospital for a bit. I had a son; I had a relationship that broke up. I wrote a comic, a memoir, a musical and had a one man show,” he says. “I don’t want to be that band who writes the sort of songs like I don’t like touring; touring is really boring. I think we needed a rest so some stuff could happen to me, to fill me up.”

 Produced by award-winning folk musician Jim Moray, ‘Wham! Bang! Pow! Let’s Rock Out!’ Is Art Brut at their pop band best. Argos recorded his vocals in one or two takes, channelling the sporadic nature of his live performances while hand claps and ad-libbed jokes and howls produce a raw and authentic work. Morphing almost any mundane experience into a
hilariously candid anecdote – whether it’s watching hipsters eat falafel on ‘Good Morning Berlin’, planning a better diet after a health scare on ‘Hospital!’ or dodging a train ticket inspector on ‘Schwarzfahrer’– Wham! Bang! Pow! Let’s Rock Out!’ is testament to the frontman’s unconventional approach to finding inspiration in just about anything.

“It’s not a game over, I got an extra life, I was born again, in a pure white light,” Argos trills on album opener, ‘Hooray!’, sparking an exuberant return to an industry where, if we’re honest, Art Brut never really fit in. On ‘Wham! Bang! Pow! Let’s Rock Out!’, Art Brut are creating anthems for outcasts.

With the departure of Jasper Future and Mikey Breyer, Art Brut are now made up of founding members Argos, Ian Catskilkin and Freddy Feedback while Toby Macfarlaine joins on guitar and Charlie Layton joins on drums. “I’ve known Charlie forever,” Argos explains. “He’s also the drummer for The Wedding Present but we always wanted to be in a band together since
we were kids. Now it’s been about 25 years of knowing each other, he’s finally in our group. Toby plays bass for Graham Coxon normally, he’s in the band cos he’s an amazing guitar player and I love him. Ian found him and I looked at his twitter feed to see what he was about and he had posted ‘A Day in the Life of Vivian Stanshall’ from the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah band. I was like yeah perfect! he’s in!’’

Argos describes Art Brut as “a democracy”, with the new line-up adding new ideas to the pot. “Toby and Charlie both rock the fuck out which is what I like,” he adds. “‘Wham! Bang! Pow! Let’s Rock Out!’ is a bit more back to basics Art Brut. It’s sort of the record I was trying to make after the first record and we didn’t quite succeed. I think I’m more confident now and I know what I want. Not being mean about our other records but it’s a poppy punk record which is what I wanted to do. I think speaking is a more honest way of getting what I want”

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Romance amid approaching armageddon. Life in a snowglobe, a pastoral scene made ever-precarious,teetering on chaos created by the flick of the wrist. Love as an antique, that generations after us will only understand from history books. Fontaines D.C.’s fourth album ROMANCE interrogates amorphous conceptsof love and relationships, alienation and identity, fantasy and reality – all building to a central statement thatChatten sings of hauntingly, invitingly, on the opening track: “Maybe romance is a place”.

11 tracks constellate ideas that have been percolating among Grian Chatten (vocals), Carlos O’Connell(guitar), Conor Curley (guitar), Conor Deegan (bass), and Tom Coll (drums) since 2022’s No.1 record SkintyFia and US tour with Arctic Monkeys. The record builds upon sonic sensibilities the band started to experimentwith on Skinty Fia, now reaching into grungier textures, hip-hop breaks and beats, shoegazey tones andcontemporary electronic sounds. It is as indebted to their times listening to Shygirl and Sega Bodega as it isto old Hollywood soundtracks, Outkast, The Prodigy and A$AP Ferg. The band introduces more assured production skills. ROMANCE’s bones were set in time spent apart, experimenting as individuals across Mexico,the Spanish countryside, and LA, and an intense production period together with producer James Ford (ArcticMonkeys, Blur) in a French chateau.

The album represents a provocative sonic and aesthetic era for the Dublin-made, now London-based band.A summer of international live shows and festivals will introduce fans to their rapidly unspooling universe andask them too: will you all-out surrender to the fantasy?

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Bonny Light Horseman’s new album, Keep Me on Your Mind/See You Free, is an ode to the blessed mess of our humanity. Confident and generous, it is an unvarnished offering that puts every feeling and supposed flaw out in the open. The themes are stacked high and staked even higher: love and loss, hope and sorrow, community and family, change and time all permeate Bonny Light Horseman’s most vulnerable and bounteous offering to date. Yet for all of its humanistic touchpoints, Keep Me on Your Mind/See You Free was forged from a kind of unexplainable magic.  

Written over five months in 2023, this third album began when the band’s core trio–Anaïs Mitchell, Eric D. Johnson, and Josh Kaufman–convened in an Irish pub alongside beloved collaborators JT Bates (drums), Cameron Ralston (bass), and recording engineer Bella Blasko. Mitchell suggested the pub as their first recording location, based on her one conversation with owner Joe O’Leary. She had a feeling about the place, and was surprised by her bandmates’ enthusiasm for the idea. Stepping inside the pub’s aged confines, the trio felt an immediate connection to its palpable sense of community, and of family, forged over many decades. 

The pub was Levis (pronounced: “leh-viss”) Corner House, a century-old watering hole in Ballydehob, a tiny coastal village in County Cork, and its energy became a singular source of Bonny Light Horseman’s creative engine. The pub’s upright piano, which they lubricated with olive oil to quiet its creaking, became a sort of spiritual fulcrum, a single entity that embodied all of the album’s motifs: imperfection as a badge of honor; aging, endurance and the passage of time; how the simplest of acts can heal us. The analogs–between this century-old meeting place of local folk and this trio of American folkies–were undeniable. "It has this sense of history; it’s also small, and crammed with a bunch of stuff that’s spilling all over the place,” says Kaufman. “It was like the pub version of our band." A painting that hung on a wall of the pub, which watched over the band during their time working, became the album cover. “I was making eye contact with that person for most of the recording,” Johnson said of the artwork. And there was a deeper connection. Before the band had even planned to record in the pub, the owner’s wife had named the woman in the painting Bonnie.

There’s magic in a place like Levis Corner House, yes, but it takes the right wizards to wield it. At the center of Bonny Light Horseman is, always, the singular combination of three powerful and tender artists–artists who expertly dodge superlatives but are quick to acknowledge the ways they strengthen and enrich one another, and the bond that makes each one better, braver and more vulnerable than they’d be on their own. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the force of their voices together, which work with complete trust in one another through the gentlest moments and the most ruthless wails. The result can comfort and cradle listeners, but also leaves them rattled, wrecked, and reborn. 

On a practical level, the “blessed mess” of Keep Me on Your Mind/See You Free shows up in its fidelity to this home, as crowd noise, laughter, coughing, and field recordings (“Think of the royalties, lads!”) convey everything from this special place in time. But philosophically, the “mess” is evidence of something deeper. It’s the imperfect, soul-nourishing fruit born of a singular communal experience, one that transforms its participants through the spirit of good company. Mitchell posits the idea of a “feast” and how dinners with friends effortlessly span courses, conversations, and hours — a meal that’s nutritious on physical and spiritual levels. “I have a friend who says you should never remove the dishes from the table, that you should sit among the wreckage,” she offers.   

 “There was this new level of letting it all hang out,” Mitchell said of the album’s making. In its evolution from recording to release, this meant compiling a double LP—eighteen songs across two discs. It also meant two titles, if not precisely two distinct records. Keep Me on Your Mind/See You Free is sprawling and welcoming, and encompasses the group’s captivating artistic layers: its roots in the sounds and lyrical spirit of traditional folk music, its branches in a more experimental and emotionally raw version of the band. 

The group tracked about half of the songs in the main room of Levis’s. They spent two days working alone. On the evening of the third, O’Leary invited some enthusiastic residents to join in. That’s not to say it’s a live album; instead, the third day of the Ireland sessions represented a serendipitous blend of energies because the audience implicitly understood the assignment. Patrons gave the band enough space to talk about arrangements and record multiple versions of songs, but they also provided an evident sense of environmental joy as they chatted over pints with friends and family. “We were doing this in the middle of their spot and they intuitively understood what was required of them,” Johnson said. “It was pretty magic.”    

The band then returned to their spiritual home, upstate New York’s Dreamland Recording Studios (where they completed their first two albums), to finish the work they had started. Frequent collaborator Mike Lewis joined on bass and tenor saxophone. Annie Nero stopped by to play upright bass and sing some harmonies for an afternoon. The days were rhapsodic and restorative, filled with crying, and songs that poured out like tears.

The poignant quandary at the center of “I Know You Know” revealed itself in mere minutes. The trio attributes the speed to the fact that they’d already finished much of Keep Me on Your Mind/See You Free and were able to “stand on the shoulders” of that creativity. It’s also demonstrative of the band’s ability to lace emotional devastation with a pop sensibility, which they’ve achieved throughout the album. Its feel-good, mandolin-laced arrangement and anthemic chorus belie how its refrain will wreck you. “I’m a fool if I love you and a fool if I let you go,” Johnson sings as Mitchell’s voice soars alongside him. 

“Tumblin Down” is similar in its melodic tribulation. A folk-rock portrayal of an unraveling relationship, it’s like the spirit of Ingmar Bergman’s “Scenes From a Marriage” set to song—light on its surface but woven from existential crisis.  “When I Was Younger,” meanwhile, is a primal scream, revolutionary for its open reckoning with motherhood, maturation and all of the things polite society doesn’t say out loud. In the song, Mitchell and Johnson’s honeyed voices meet and transform into a two-headed beast formed from pent-up emotion; its roar is necessary, beautiful, and scary. 

“Old Dutch” originated as a voice memo recorded in a historical church of the same name in Kaufman’s home city. “It was timestamped ‘Old Dutch’ and that was too perfect; it sounded like a Bonny Light Horseman song,” he said. Its choral refrain echoes those origins; it also punctuates the band’s tale of shifting love with that alluring thing the heart is inevitably steered by—a lingering, often illogical, feeling. 

With Keep Me on Your Mind/See You Free, Bonny Light Horseman offers a distinct sense of grace, and a reminder that life is most lived when things aren’t so perfect. Over the years, the band has accumulated many miles on the collective odometer of life. That’s all reflected here, in these modern folk songs, laced with glory and chaos. As Mitchell puts it: “It’s not concise. It’s not simple. It’s messy, and that’s OK.” 

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