Melbourne-based five-piece CIVIC – Jim McCullough (vocals), Lewis Hodgson (guitar), Roland Hlavka (bass), Jackson Harry (guitar). Matt Blach (drums) – return today with a frenetic and driving new single “Born in the Heat”. The song is a frenzied blast of raw tension that captures the psychic unrest of feeling hopelessly detached from your own surroundings and circumstances. When asked about the single McCullough shares “‘Born in the Heat’ Is about resistance. It’s about being lead or distracted by something that seems alluring, only to find yourself trapped somewhere you don’t belong. There is a moment of defiance and a stand, then change. The born in the heat reference is just for fun really, an ode to being born in the Australian climate. It conveys good imagery.”

“Born in the Heat” follow’s the November 2^nd release of the “End of the Line” – the album’s lead single (watch the James Gorter directed music video HERE) – and is the latest from CIVIC’s visceral new full-length studio album Taken By Force – due out February 10^{th .}  Recorded in the Castlemaine countryside at Harry’s father’s house, CIVIC enlisted Rob Younger of seminal Australian punk band Radio Birdman to produce and Mikey Young of Total Control and Eddy Current Suppression to mix and master the LP.

Taken By Force further cements CIVIC’s reputation as one of the most raw, energetic, and exciting bands to emerge from the Melbourne punk scene in years.

Nilüfer Yanya announces the deluxe version of her critically acclaimed sophomore album PAINLESS due December 14th via ATO Records. The deluxe album will include five additional recordings, including the Sampha and King Krule remixes of “midnight sun” that are out today, along with three original PAINLESS songs reimagined with producer Will Archer. The spacious, drum and bass-infused remix from Sampha and the sparkling synth based remix from King Krule follows Nilüfer’s cover of PJ Harvey’s “rid of me,” which will also be included on the deluxe and was shared earlier this year.

Nilüfer expresses her excitement about the announcement sharing, “PAINLESS is going deluxe! I’m honestly so glad so many of you listened to PAINLESS when it first came out 9 months ago so I’m very happy to be able to offer you the deluxe version with two new remixes of ‘midnight sun’ and my cover of ‘rid of me’.”

Upon its release, PAINLESS garnered a Best New Music stamp from Pitchfork and features the stand-out tracks “anotherlife,” “stabilise” and the original version of “midnight sun,” which Nilüfer performed on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. The album has already been included on several best albums of year lists including Vogue, Pitchfork, Stereogum, The Ringer, Consequence of Sound and Brooklyn Vegan. With PAINLESS, Nilüfer runs head first into the depths of emotional vulnerability. The album was recorded between a basement studio in Stoke Newington and Riverfish Music in Penzance with collaborator and producer Will Archer, DEEK Recordings founder Bullion, Big Thief producer Andrew Sarlo, and musician Jazzi Bobbi. PAINLESS follows her renowned 2019 debut album Miss Universe and her 2021 EP Feeling Lucky?, which further explored Nilüfer’s fascination with ‘90s alt-rock melodies and drew on themes of resentment, her fear of flying, and the concept of luck.

Pre-order/save PAINLESS (Deluxe), listen to the Sampha and King Krule remixes of “midnight sun” here and stay tuned for more from Nilüfer Yanya.

Nilüfer Yanya
PAINLESS (Deluxe)
ATO Records
December 14, 2022

1. the dealer
2. L:R
3. shameless
4. stabilise
5. chase me
6. midnight sun
7. trouble
8. try
9. company
10. belong with you
11. the mystic
12. anotherlife
13. shameless (reflects)
14. midnight sun (reflects)
15. chase me (reflects)
16. midnight sun (sampha remix)
17. midnight sun (king krule remix)
18. rid of me

Today, Adrian Quesada shares “Starry Nights” and “Rise of the Have Nots,” two new singles and videos that further immerse listeners in the intoxicating, nocturnal noir of Jaguar Sound. Out this Friday, November 18th on ATO Records, the second album of the year from the Grammy-winning guitarist, producer and Black Pumas co-founder is a head-nodding and hypnotic opus, heavily inspired by hip-hop and the unheralded composers of 1970s-era Italian and French film music. On the equally celestial and soulful “Starry Nights,” harpist Mary Lattimore and pianist Neal Francis make special appearances alongside cinematic layers of violin from Alexis Buffum and Quesada’s own bass, guitar and keyboard playing, while “Rise of the Have Nots” erupts into an arrangement of frenzied beats and menacing synth. 

Listen to “Starry Nights” b/w “Rise of the Have Nots,” accompanied by visuals from Telepath Design: https://atorecords-ffm.com/starrynights 

“One of the few positive things that came out of the early pandemic was a reduced human impact on our planet and out of that came some rare and beautiful starry nights,” says Adrian Quesada. “I was inspired to make music that reflected the skies, very much capturing a moment in time.”

On “Rise of the Have Nots” he adds, “I imagined an animated sci-fi film with a revolt against oppression of all kinds and the song plays out like a musical story, climaxing with a long but victorious battle.”

“Starry Nights” and “Rise of the Have Nots” follow the recently released “Noble Metals,” and across the twelve instrumental tracks of Jaguar Sound, Adrian Quesada showcases his singular and signature ability to build a bridge between seemingly disparate worlds of music, driven in part by his experience growing up on the border of multiple countries, cultures and languages. Originally conceived during the onset of the COVID-19 lockdown, Jaguar Sound also paints a musical portrait of a particular moment and set of sonic and emotional obsessions in Quesada’s life, when he’d ride his bike every day after dusk, listening to The Alchemist before cranking out beats that he then turned to song. In addition to Mary Lattimore and Neal Francis, Jaguar Sound features Ikebe Shakedown, keys from David Garza and an array of strings, horns and percussion that were produced, written, engineered and mixed by Adrian Quesada at his own Electric Deluxe studio at home in Austin, TX. 

Jaguar Sound arrives on the heels of Adrian Quesada’s Boleros Psicodélicos LP, which dropped earlier in 2022 and has since led him to performances for The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, star-studded sets for the Austin City Limits music festival and PBS program, a Kennedy Center celebration for the Hispanic Heritage Foundation and beyond. A sweeping tribute to his longtime love for the golden age of Latin American balada music, Boleros Psicodélicos saw Adrian Quesada unite an international community of collaborators such as Angelica Garcia, Gabriel Garzón-Montano, Gaby Moreno, Girl Ultra, iLe, Marc Ribot, Money Mark, Tita and numerous others, garnering praise from Rolling Stone, NPR Music, Variety and more. “It is difficult to recreate the magic of a balada, a song of longing popular in the 1970s that defined a generation in Latin America,” says The New York Times. “Adrian Quesada manages to harness the genre’s power.” 

Pre-order Jaguar Sound, and listen to Adrian Quesada in a Guest DJ set on KCRW’s Morning Becomes Eclectic 

Rayland Baxter’s If I Were A Butterfly is out today, available on all streaming services and on limited edition pink vinyl exclusively via the ATO store.

For the making of his fourth album, Baxter holed up for over a year at a former rubber-band factory turned studio in the Kentucky countryside—a seemingly humble environment that proved to be something of a wonderland. “I spent that year living in a barn with the squirrels and the birds, on my own most of the time, and I discovered so much about music and how to create it,” says the Tennessee-bred singer/songwriter. “Instead of going into a studio with a producer for two weeks, I just waited for the record to build itself. I’d get up and go outside, see a butterfly and connect that with some impulsive thought I’d had three months ago, and suddenly a song I’d been working on would make sense. That’s how the whole album came to be.”

The follow-up to 2018’s critically acclaimed Wide Awake, If I Were a Butterfly finds Baxter co-producing alongside Tim O’Sullivan (Grace Potter, The Head and the Heart) and Kai Welch (Molly Tuttle, Sierra Hull), slowly piecing together the album’s patchwork of lush psychedelia and Beatlesesque pop. In addition to working at Thunder Sound (the Kentucky studio he called home for months on end), Baxter recorded in California, Texas, Tennessee, and Washington, enlisting a remarkable lineup of musicians: Shakey Graves, Lennon Stella, several members of Cage the Elephant, Zac Cockrell of Alabama Shakes, Morning Teleportation’s Travis Goodwin, and legendary Motown drummer Miss Bobbye Hall, among many others. In an especially meaningful turn, two of the album’s tracks feature the elegant pedal steel work of his father, Bucky Baxter (a musician who performed with Bob Dylan and who passed away in May 2020). Thanks to the extraordinary care and ingenuity behind its creation, If I Were a Butterfly arrives as a work of rarefied magic, capable of stirring up immense feeling while leaving the listener happily wonderstruck.

Baxter’s debut release as a producer, If I Were a Butterfly bears a dazzling unpredictability that has much to do with his limitless imagination as a collector and collagist of sound. “Sometimes the bullfrogs in the pond outside would pulse in a certain tempo and I’d apply that to a song, or I’d hear a bird chirping and it would inspire me to add harmonica in a particular place,” he says. “I could be walking around this massive building in the middle of the night and the air-conditioning would turn on, and it’d give me the idea to include a synth part that holds a similar note. I’d wait for those moments to happen and whenever I tried to force anything, the music usually rejected it.”

A perfect introduction to If I Were a Butterfly’s elaborate sonic world, the album-opening title track begins with a recording of a Baxter singing at age four, then drifts into a delicately sprawling reverie ornamented with so many lovely details (lavish flute and cello melodies, radiant horns, the hypnotic harmonies of Lennon Stella and Baxter’s girlfriend, Sophia Rose). “I liked the idea of the first voice on the record being me as a little kid, not knowing where I’d be today,” notes Baxter, who embedded newly unearthed audio clips of himself and his older sister Brooke all throughout the album. Graced with the combustible guitar work of his bandmate Barney Cortez, “Billy Goat” kicks up a potent tension with its restless grooves and hot-tempered gang vocals. “It’s a breakup song about being with someone who’s on a different life path—one side wants to influence the other, and inevitably you part ways,” says Baxter. From there, the album takes on a feverish momentum with “Rubberband Man,” a delightfully frenzied track channeling a wild and giddy freedom. “There’s rubber bands all over the property at Thunder Sound—in the earth, in the concrete, used as insulation for the studio,” says Baxter. “I took a mishmash of images in my head and it turned into a song about staying flexible, rolling with the punches.”

In its searching reflection on love and loss and striving for transcendence, If I Were a Butterfly reaches a quietly glorious intensity on “Tadpole”: a piano ballad threaded with childhood memories at turns oddly tender (catching frogs and crawfish in a nearby toxic creek) and nightmarish (hearing the gunshot when an across-the-street neighbor took her own life). And on “My Argentina,” If I Were a Butterfly closes out with a piano-driven and painfully raw outpouring, its starkness intermittently broken by soulful strings and gospel-esque harmonies. “One time at the studio I stayed up all night and played that song maybe 100 times; we ended up using the last take, which was recorded at about five in the morning,” says Baxter. “It’s a song that represents the thoughts one might have about a perfect love life, and I love how it ends the album in a big angelic cloud of reverb.”

For Baxter, the act of self-producing such a sonically and emotionally expansive body of work proved both exhilarating and arduous. “It really wore me out to spend all that time alone at the studio, editing the hell out of this record; my heart definitely suffered,” he says. “But I also had the guidance of my dad, who was in my dreams all the time—if I was moving too fast, I’d hear him telling me to slow down.” Another profound influence on the album-making process: the 2018 deaths of Baxter’s close friends Billy Swayze (a musician whose parents owned the rubber band company that became Thunder Sound) and Tiger Merritt (the vocalist/guitarist for Morning Teleportation, who worked with Swayze in constructing the studio). “Billy and Tiger had been going up there since 2015, and finally they turned it into a legit recording studio,” he says. “It’s a very special place to me, so they’re two of the four angels I decided to dedicate this record to.”

Even in its most somber moments, If I Were a Butterfly wholly fulfills Baxter’s mission of imparting a certain purposeful joy. “It’s been a weird few years, but I think the big picture is for us to just exist and find love and be loved, and try to see that all the daily bullshit is simply bugs on the windshield,” says Baxter. “I hope that this album makes people feel the way I do whenever I listen to my favorite records, and that it gives them a platform to dream on.”

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