{"title":"Hardly Art","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eHardly Art is an independent record label based in Seattle, WA. Founded in early 2007 by Sub Pop Records, Hardly Art is run by three full-time employees and is distributed by the Alternative Distribution Alliance (ADA) and Sub Pop.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eWith a focus on discovering and promoting emerging artists, Hardly Art has established itself as a prominent player in the music industry. The label prides itself on its commitment to supporting artists who push boundaries and defy genres.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eFrom indie rock to punk, pop to experimental sounds, Hardly Art's diverse roster showcases the best of underground talent. 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Well, about that: “Everyone kept saying, ‘The stuff that you’re writing is slightly too left-of-center—weirdo stuff,” remembers Morrissey. “Why don’t you start your own project?” Thus ill peach, a pop band with a punk streak and a taste for both the rotten and the sweet, with an approach to making music that goes something like: “Do you want to pick up a guitar and do you want to be on this water jug and we’ll record it on the iPhone and create some weird drum pattern?” \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eFollowing a series of well-received EPs on their own Pop Can Records (a record label and artist collective Morrissey and close collaborator Jesse Schuster run with friends), a digital single for Hardly Art’s 15th anniversary series, and some colourful music videos that crystallized the band’s visual aesthetic along with their sound, ill peach’s “weirdo stuff” comes to fruition on first full-length \u003ci\u003eTHIS IS NOT AN EXIT\u003c\/i\u003e: a collection of anthemic songs built out of bright pop and gritty experimental elements (Morrissey names the sculptural use of distortion on the final albums by Low as an inspiration), punctuated with hooky choruses ready to be screamed along to in the safety of your own bedroom or with a bunch of friends at one of ill peach’s intense live shows. If ill peach first blossomed in New York, it took quarantine in Los Angeles for the project to ripen. The end of the world turned out to be what ill peach needed to get real with themselves. “It helped us creatively to zone in and removed us from the [industry] side of things to where we could just be like: this is our new identity, let's jump with both feet.” \u003ci\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eTHIS IS NOT AN EXIT\u003c\/i\u003e’s title is a reflection of something Corazza realized during a period of personal and familial crises. “I kept walking into buildings and I’d try to exit somewhere and the sign would be like, ‘This is not an exit,’” she says. “It just felt like a metaphor for a hopeful thing—don't give up yet.”  This combination of hope and anxiety is all over \u003ci\u003eTHIS IS NOT AN EXIT\u003c\/i\u003e, reflected in a sonic palette (Alternative! Electronica! Indie! Radio pop! Coldplay!) as eclectic as it is unpretentious. 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A lovely album of layered melodic pop-rock arrangements fusing rock and electronic instrumentation with Nick Llobet’s poignant, witty, and vulnerable lyrics.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Hardly Art","offers":[{"title":"Violet LP","offer_id":50415496167755,"sku":"2185387","price":27.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"CD","offer_id":50415495479627,"sku":"2185386","price":14.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0867\/1120\/6219\/files\/m34GY9fb_06b6fec1_thumbnail_4096.jpg?v=1726690655"},{"product_id":"weirdo-shrine","title":"Weirdo Shrine","description":"\u003cp\u003eIn early 2015, La Luz adjourned to a surf shop in San Dimas, California where, with the help of producer-engineer Ty Segall, they realized the vision of capturing the band's restless live energy and commiting it to tape. 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In fact, this introversion was one reason he began playing music as a toddler—to communicate without speaking, to identify with others without the direct representation of words. It has worked, too, with Cohen’s terrific stint in the mighty Deerhoof and his own captivating art-rock act The Curtains, preceding production and session work for the likes of Weyes Blood, Kurt Vile, Le Ren, and Marina Allen. Somewhere along that long way, Cohen started writing lyrics. He found that, though it didn’t come naturally, the process offered a new sense of self-discovery and reckoning, a way to see himself and the world from unexpected angles. His three twilit albums of casually complicated pop during the last decade radiated these epiphanies: handling family strife, navigating advancing age, and understanding social woes.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eBut Cohen has never had as much to sing so directly as he does on \u003ci\u003ePaint A Room\u003c\/i\u003e, his first album in five years and his debut for Hardly Art. If Cohen’s meanings have previously lurked inside the tessellated musical layers he built alone, they are newly clear and resonant here, animated and underscored for the first time by a band playing in real time. There is the endless miasma of state violence on the subversively melodious opener “Damage,” the existential exhaustion of modernity on the horn-traced jangle “Laughing”: this is Cohen communicating with friends not only through his deep understanding of groove, harmony, and hook but also with his listeners through songs that croon of our uneasy little era.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e On \u003ci\u003ePaint A Room\u003c\/i\u003e, Cohen’s music feels like a warm spring breeze, easy to love and gentle to feel. But it’s often carrying something heavy, as if blowing in from some unseen storm cloud. \u003ci\u003ePaint A Room\u003c\/i\u003e both reckons with reality and conjures an alternate one, where nighttime walks and a neighbor’s wind chimes offer endless escapes for the imagination, space for the mind to roam. Sublime and sun-lit, these 10 songs consider dreamy new ways out of old predicaments, clearly stating the problem and dancing and singing their way somewhere new. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003ePaint A Room\u003c\/i\u003e features Jeff Parker contributing the fluttering horn arrangement on “Damage,” and Parker collaborator Josh Johnson (who produced Meshell Ndegeocello’s Grammy-Award-winning album The Omnichord Real Book) supplying flute, sax, and clarinet arrangements throughout the record.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Hardly Art","offers":[{"title":"Red LP","offer_id":50442959946059,"sku":"2198048","price":27.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"CD","offer_id":50442959552843,"sku":"2198047","price":14.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0867\/1120\/6219\/files\/unnamed_-_2024-05-01T160136.846_1a679334_thumbnail_4096.jpg?v=1727006602"},{"product_id":"i-want-the-door-to-open","title":"I Want The Door To Open","description":"\u003cp\u003eFollow-up to Lala Lala’s acclaimed 2018 sophomore album, The Lamb. 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It conjures the ennui of Bright Eyes alongside the barefaced storytelling of John Prine, the overstuffed lists of Fred Thomas with the lackadaisical humor of Colleen Green, among many others.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThomas attributes the dexterity of the record to Duterte, who recorded and engineered most of it in addition to serving up plenty of encouragement when Thomas got down on the process. “As a comic, I used to test out new songs during sets to see if the funny bits were hitting, but since I wrote this in isolation I ended up writing lyrics and worrying less about making jokes,” Thomas says. That said, the album’s plenty funny. Stand-out and lead single “Rigamarole” opens with a Thomas-voiced infomercial that recalls his oft-cited lookalike Jim Carrey as the Grinch, before launching into a buoyant pop song about being depressed.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eWhitmer Thomas will admit that when he traveled home to small town Gulf Shores, Alabama to record his HBO stand-up special, \u003ci\u003eThe Golden One\u003c\/i\u003e, he expected to be greeted as a returning hero, a conquering king, or at minimum, a guy with a moderately successful career as an entertainer in Los Angeles. “I expected a big welcome home, open arms, but when I went back I realized: nobody fucking knows me. Nobody remembers me,” Thomas says. “In the years I’d been performing that show, I’d been romanticizing my childhood in this mythologized place, but the visit made me see that I’m not really from there anymore.”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe sense of alienation compounded when Thomas recognized how few people in town remembered his mom, to whom \u003ci\u003eThe Golden One \u003c\/i\u003eis dedicated and largely about. Thomas grew up watching her perform with her twin sister at the legendary Flora-Bama Lounge, where he set the special, and still counts her as one of his musical influences. His new album, \u003ci\u003eThe Older I Get, the Funnier I Was\u003c\/i\u003e, isn’t overtly about his mom, her presence is deeply felt throughout. While in Gulf Shores, Thomas discovered dozens of her old recordings, all of which had been wrecked by Katrina, but upon returning to LA, Thomas paid “a fancy place in Hollywood” to fix the tapes and hired Melina Duterte (Jay Som, Bachelor, Routine) to mix them. The two struck up a collaborative friendship, and Thomas had the sound of his mom’s voice back. “I was listening to songs she recorded when she was about my age, just these heartfelt, sweet Americana songs,” he says. “I decided then that I wanted to lose the Ian Curtis voice I always sing with; I wanted to do what came naturally, because my mom always sounded like herself, even when she was singing some cheesy reggae song about, like, Jamaica.”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThus he went into \u003ci\u003eThe Older I Get, the Funnier I Was\u003c\/i\u003e knowing it was time to retire his darkwave persona, and leaning into his natural, chirpier voice, which he says sounds “like a 12-year-old’s.” It makes sense: much of the album chronicles what Thomas calls “being a kid and feeling like you have no control and overcompensating by being annoying.” “So much of the album is about witnessing drug and alcohol addiction as a kid and seeing what it does to people, but also realizing that there's nothing you can do about it,” Thomas says. 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Medford and Wax set up shop at Rare Book Room studios in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, and completed the basic tracking with musicians Simon Hanes on bass and Max Almario on drums. “Coming into a space where some of my biggest inspirations like Bjork, Dirty Projectors, and Deerhunter had all once also recorded, I felt determined to push myself and test every boundary that I may have subconsciously created along the way. Gabe made me feel comfortable with attempting anything,” Medford says. 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Dealing with health issues, freshly out of a relationship, and in the middle of an existential crisis, she realized halfway through a tour supporting her band’s third album I Used to Spend So Much Time Alone that she was going through too much to continue. “I was really struggling; I was really depressed. I felt like I couldn’t sing or be a person,” Shapiro recalls. “At that point I couldn’t evenimagine playing a show again, I was so over it.”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eReturning home to a newly empty Seattle one-bedroom apartment, Shapiro had wanted for a long time to learn how to record and mix her own music, and out of the uncertainty of the future of her music career and her health, she began to record the songs that would become \u003ci\u003ePerfect Version\u003c\/i\u003e, her solo debut for Hardly Art. What she created in the space of ten songs is an intimate and beautifully self-aware examination of feeling lost in the life you’ve created for yourself. It’s an album of shimmering guitars and layered vocals that feels vast in the emotional depth it conveys and masterful in the way each song is intentionally crafted and recorded.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eOver the course of a tumultuous year of trying to find stability amidst depression and surgery, Shapiro ultimately rediscovered the parts of music that she loved through the process. Her perfectionist qualities create an album that shines in tiny lyrical moments and meticulous guitar parts. “When the rest of my life felt out of control, I felt like this was my chance to be in control of everything,” says Shapiro. She plays all the instruments (save for a mouth trumpet solo by Darren Hanlon and guest violin by Annie Truscott) and after recording and mixing the first batch of four songs at the Vault studio with Ian LeSage decided to record the final six tracks alone in her apartment, adding drums in the studio later and learning to mix them with the help of her friend David Hrivnak. \u003ci\u003ePerfect Version\u003c\/i\u003e is a fully realized vision from a gifted songwriter finding a more intimate voice. “So what comes next?” she questions on the album closer \u003ci\u003eEmpty Cup \u003c\/i\u003ewhich explores the quiet satisfaction of being alone with yourself and creating a blank slate. “A lasting sense of self,” she concludes.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eLP - First Pressing on Royal Blue Vinyl with Download.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eTape - Three-Panel J-Card, Royal Blue Cassette Shell, Clear Case.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Hardly Art","offers":[{"title":"Blue | LP","offer_id":50456608801099,"sku":"1061567","price":24.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"CD","offer_id":50456611553611,"sku":"1061566","price":14.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0867\/1120\/6219\/files\/387ef49f-a8fb-43b4-901e-960d29573f03_thumbnail_4096.jpg?v=1727199852"},{"product_id":"la-luz","title":"La Luz","description":"\u003cp\u003eOn their self-titled fourth album, La Luz launch themselves into a new realm of emotional intimacy for a collection of songs steeped in the mysteries of the natural world and the magic of human chemistry that has found manifestation in the musical ESP between guitarist and songwriter Shana Cleveland, bassist Lena Simon, and keyboardist Alice Sandahl. To help shape \u003ci\u003eLa Luz,\u003c\/i\u003e the band found a kindred spirit in producer Adrian Younge. Though primarily known for his work with hip-hop, soul, and jazz acts, Younge saw in La Luz a shared vision that transcended genre. “We both create music with the same attitude, and that’s what I love about them,” he says. “They are never afraid to be risky and their style is captivating. It was an honour to work with them.” The result is an album that is both the most naturalistic and psychedelic of the band’s career. All the elements of classic La Luz are still present—the lush harmonies, the impeccable musicianship, the gorgeous melodies—but it’s a richer, earthier iteration, replete with inorganic sounds that mimic the surreality of nature—the humming of invisible bugs, the atmospheric sizzle of a hot day. After spending the last few years living in rural northern California, Cleveland’s lyrics have become more grounded, less interested in traveling to other dimensions than in peeking behind the curtain of this one. 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It’s been thirteen years since he left Alabama for LA, becoming a linchpin for LA’s young, independent comedy scene with Power Violence, the monthly show he hosted with friends. But he became haunted by the question: had he already peaked, just like his mom, singer in a local band with big ambitions that never made it out of the Flora-Bama Lounge in Gulf Shores? Rather than shy away from all that messy self-mythology, Whitmer tapped the source of it all through writing this one-man show featuring his own original music. \u003ci\u003eSongs from The Golden One\u003c\/i\u003e, a companion album of songs from the special, features Whitmer’s darkwave bangers, synthesizing relatable content: millennial anxieties, therapy-speak jokes, and the annals of his own childhood tragedies.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eSongs from The Golden One \u003c\/i\u003efeature ten cuts of borderline-John Maus cosplay with spasms of pop-punk absurdity. 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Taking cues from boundary-pushers Sonic Youth, Girl Friday favour the rush of jarring turns over the safety of well-defined pop taxonomy. Looking to queer provocateurs like Placebo, they cherish the frisson of incongruous musical elements: \"really dark, heavy things mashed up with quite beautiful things, whether that be a distorted guitar line and a sentimental vocal or vice versa,\" as Ellen puts it. That duality dovetails with the thematic friction running through the album, the alternating despair and hope that intertwine in the fight to survive as disenfranchised people in the US. Written during a year of personal struggle for all four band members, \u003ci\u003eAndrogynous Mary\u003c\/i\u003e reflects the solace they took in each other -- as a band, but also as a microcommunity and a chosen family. 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Recorded at Different Fur Studios in San Francisco with producer Patrick Brown, Falling finds Dude York sounding bigger and more fully-realized than ever with hits that would feel perfectly at home sandwiched between Jimmy Eat World and Third Eye Blind in early 2000s alt-rock radio rotation, while somehow still sounding utterly their own. Peter Richards (guitar) and England (bass) share equal songwriting and lead vocal duties on this record, a significant change from their previous album, 2017’s \u003ci\u003eSincerely\u003c\/i\u003e, on which England fronted only two songs. The duality of their songwriting and vocals complement each other emotionally and sonically, with Andrew Hall’s harmonies and driving drums providing their own unique character in each song. The collaboration is clear—each part is carefully crafted, with Richards’ guitar adding texture to the verses and then soaring into the particularly special kind of guitar solos that make you want to sing along. 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The four piece—Julia Shapiro (vocals, guitar, drums), Lydia Lund (vocals, guitar), Gretchen Grimm (drums, vocals, guitar) and Annie Truscott (bass)—is nine years deep in this, after all. It seems now, more than ever, that circuit is a movement of intentionality, one that creates a space inside which they can be themselves, among themselves. It’s a space where the euphoria of making music with your best friends is protected from the outside world’s churning expectations. It’s a kind of safe zone for the band to occupy as their best selves: a group of friends who love each other.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eTheir fourth record, \u003ci\u003eChastity Belt\u003c\/i\u003e, comes out of that safe space. 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The new self-titled album is the work of the band playing “old songs, and trying new things on top of it,” like adding more dynamic harmonies and violin, says bassist Annie Truscott. Lydia, Gretchen, and Julia all share lead vocals on different tracks on the album. The result is their most sonically developed and nuanced record yet; one that’s not only a product of, but a series of reflections on what it means to take what you need and to understand yourself better.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eMany of Chastity Belt’s signature dynamics, from the silly to the sincere, have read as feminist gestures: the Cool Slut DGAF-iness, the shrugging off of the “women in rock” press gargle, the fundamentally punk act of creating music on your own as a woman, and being lyrically forthright. What the making of \u003ci\u003eChastity Belt\u003c\/i\u003e reveals is that the band has tapped into a deeper tradition of women making art on their terms: the act of self-preservation in favor of the long game. In favour of each other. In this cultural moment, taking space like this to prioritize the love over the product seems progressive. 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It’s also the name of the brand new full length by visual artist, writer, songwriter, and musician Shana Cleveland. Subtle, powerful, and unafraid. We can’t actually tell you how much we love this record because you’d never believe us, so we’ll just say that it is her strongest and most personal album to date. These songs are as strong as the bricks in the Brill building, and seem destined to be covered by others in years to come. Where her previous record, 2019’s \u003ci\u003eNight of the Worm Moon \u003c\/i\u003e(Hardly Art) functions as a collection of speculative fictions equally inspired by Afro-futurist pioneers Herman “Sun Ra” Blount and Octavia Butler, \u003ci\u003eManzanita \u003c\/i\u003econcerns the love that loves to love. “This is a supernatural love album set in the California wilderness,” Cleveland explains. The combinations of words and song structure are so strong throughout that one hardly notices Cleveland’s nimble fingerpicking on first listen, or how much is packed into the arrangements. The lyrics are satisfyingly direct, with the buoyantly whimsical descriptions typical of the 1960s New York School of poetry. It’s peppered with the kind of unexpected turns that make the words more modern, and in their spookiness they are more West Coast, as in “Mystic Mine,” with its “Mystic Mine Lane, cars rotting away\/ I feel so relieved to be\/ Back in the country.” So much of the pop music we love is propelled by those first blushes of infatuation and lust, but \u003ci\u003eManzanita \u003c\/i\u003econcerns the kind of love that one can only experience with time, work, and devotion. Cleveland says: “The songs were all written while I was pregnant (side A) or shortly after my son's birth in that weird everything-has-quietly-but-monumentally-shifted state (side B),” she says. Moving to the country, starting a family, laughing for real at the same joke the thirteenth time you’ve heard it, surviving heavy shit (this is the first release since Cleveland’s successful treatment for a diagnosis of breast cancer at the start of 2022).  This is a love album that’s somehow populated with the insect world, ghosts, and evil spirits. Sonically, \u003ci\u003eManzanita \u003c\/i\u003esits in a meadow similar to her previous solo records, set back and away from the genre-recombinant garage pop of her band La Luz. This is part due to the fact that there’s a different sonic palette in use here. While Cleveland continues to play guitar and vocals; Johnny Goss, who has recorded all of Shana’s solo material and early La Luz recordings, and Abbey Blackwell (Alvvays, La Luz) play the bass; Olie Eshleman is on pedal steel; and Will Sprott plays the keyboards, dulcimer, glockenspiel, and harpsichord—little of which would have been out of place on her previous two solo records—Sprott also adds layers of synthesizer infused with the sounds of the natural world. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eFor fans of Robert Wyatt, Opal, Nilsson, Kevin Ayers and his Whole Wide World, Norma Tanega, Jessica Pratt, Julie Driscoll, Michael Nesmith, Sibylle Baier\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Hardly Art","offers":[{"title":"CD","offer_id":50466885665099,"sku":"2006662","price":12.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"LP","offer_id":50466885763403,"sku":"2006664","price":27.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0867\/1120\/6219\/files\/ShanaCleveland_Manzanita_2400x2400_918f3096_thumbnail_4096.jpg?v=1727328305"},{"product_id":"the-agent-intellect","title":"The Agent Intellect","description":"\u003cp\u003eFantastic and one of the albums of 2015. \u003ci\u003eThe Agent Intellect\u003c\/i\u003e is Protomartyr's third and finest work to date. 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