Flowers for the Dead

Flowers for the Dead is the Washington D.C.-based rock project of Jessie Szegö (guitar/vocals), Naomi Seat (bass/vocals), and Ricky "Ten-bears" Martinez.

Starling

Confusion, frustration, love and loss are all expressed throughout the first album, “Forgive Me,” from Los Angeles alternative band, Starling. Written over the course of about a year, the LA band recorded themselves in various sheds, apartments, and garages. The record was mixed by drummer, Erik Sathrum Johnson, artwork was shot by the band and their friends, and then mastered by Greg Obis (MJ Lenderman, Wishy, Duster).

Songs like “Quiet” start off with a slow and delicate melody, and then explode in sound halfway through. The guitars in the song were recorded in the middle of summer in a garage with no AC—a physically intense, almost spiritual experience that bleeds into the recording. The lead single, “I Can Be Convinced” is a sad and yearning song, with a need to be still; yet ironically, it’s one of the most upbeat songs on the record.

The album closes with the nearly seven-minute “Keep It” a track Starling had been performing since early 2024. Lyrically charged with frustration, it builds tension through eerie, hushed verses that give way to a loud, distorted chorus—showcasing the band’s ability to channel emotion through dynamic contrast.

With “Forgive Me,” Starling has crafted a deeply personal and fully DIY record, shaping every sonic detail themselves. The result is an album where every melody, rhythm, and raw feeling is intentionally placed and unmistakably theirs.

Total Wife

Come Back Down, the new album by Nashville experimental-pop duo Total Wife, was born from the edge of sleep. When composer and producer Luna Kupper would begin to fall asleep during late-night mixing sessions, the songs would follow her into the halfway place between dream and lucidity. Like Dale Cooper in Twin Peaks, she’d wake with a new perspective on the puzzle she was piecing together. “I’m a psychological mixer — I’m trying to think of how someone’s experiencing the sound, versus getting stuck in trying to make all these different tones and using all this gear to make something sound a certain way,” Kupper says.

And like a spiral from waking life into dream, the songs on Come Back Down are endlessly self- referential, building whole universes from a single point. Kupper sold all of her synths to make rent before she started working on the album, and so every inorganic sound is instead built from samples of the band’s own work. A guitar on one song may be reprocessed and used as a synth on the next, while everywhere on the album vocal samples are taken from a single unreleased cover of Elliott Smith’s “Between the Bars.” In tribute to this process, the album was almost named The Julia Set after the mathematical equation which feeds into itself again and again, creating beautiful fractal images. The intention was to create something complex but accessible; experimental, yet precise and without abstraction.