New Zealand-born, Melbourne-bred and now Los Angeles-based Jess Cornelius has release her debut album, Distance, via Part Time Records / Remote Control. The album follows singles 'Kitchen Floor' and 'Body Memory,' which “documents the aftermath of a miscarriage, yet has the sound of a hard-earned, springtime bloom” (NYLON). Distance celebrates newness - new beginnings and new perspectives on endings, from the chaos of a vagabond lifestyle to having a child just weeks before the album’s release (Cornelius had her baby the day after the last song, 'Body Memory,' was shared).

A lot has changed since Jess Cornelius began writing the songs that would comprise Distance.

For starters, she moved halfway around the world from Melbourne, Australia to Los Angeles. At the time, Cornelius had a few new songs and the idea of finally making a record of her own, excited to start fresh after several years as the primary songwriter in the Melbourne-based outfit Teeth and Tongue.

But the distance that Cornelius addresses over the course of these 10 songs is hardly a geographical one. Instead, the album — her solo debut on Part Time Records — finds a deft songwriter analysing the space between society’s expectations for her and her own dreams; between the illusion of love and the reality of disappointment; between a past she is ready to let go of and a future she could have hardly imagined.

As Cornelius puts it, “A lot of the record was about me deciding to continue this nomadic lifestyle of being a musician. I wrote about coming to terms with that reality. People would ask me if I was going to have a family and a lot of the songs are about me being okay with not pursuing that path. It was about coming to terms with the choices I had made.”

She adds with a laugh, “And then two years later, I’m knocked up and married. I couldn’t have imagined that.”

The album’s sounds and tones were selected with great care. Cornelius says it was important for the album to reflect the local music scene of her new home. With the help of producer Tony Buchen — another Australian transplant who approached Cornelius after a show at Los Angeles’ Bootleg Theater — Distance became a roving affair, recorded in a string of Los Angeles studios with a changing cast of friends and local musicians.

The album features contributions by Stella Mozgawa (Warpaint), harpist Mary Lattimore, Emily Elhaj (Angel Olsen), Stephanie Drootin (Bright Eyes), Jesse Quebbeman-Turley (Hand Habits), whistler Molly Lewis and special appearances by Justin Sullivan (Night Shop, Kevin Morby) and Laura Jean Anderson.

Release: July 24, 2020, Part Time Records/Remote Control
Words: Remote Control

Marcus Whale (Collarbones, BV) has released his second studio album Lucifer.

In development for four years and teased by a series of performance artworks in collaboration with artist Athena Thebus, the album mines the grand drama of good and evil from Catholicism to make a case for Lucifer, the brightest and most beautiful angel, as a light for those forsaken by God.

In the rich tradition of queer performance, Lucifer appropriates and displaces the theatrical moralism learned from a Catholic upbringing in service of imagining a world beyond its present bounds.

Extending on the orchestral scope of debut album Inland Sea (co-produced by HTRK’s Nigel Lee-Yang),
the self-produced Lucifer places the fallen angel in a strange and uncanny intersection of soundworlds, as linked to the sci-fi elasticity of contemporary club music as to 90s industrial metal or the ecclesiastical tones of an organ-accompanied church choir. At the centre of each song lies Whale’s voice, whose melodies serve as a guide through this spooky milieu.

Lucifer follows Collarbones’ 2019 album Futurity and 2016 solo album Inland Sea, both longlisted for
the Australian Music Prize and nominated for SMAC Awards. Like Inland Sea, Lucifer is paired with a written work as its physical product, a zine containing lyrics, further texts, visual works and a dialogue with collaborator Athena Thebus.

Release: July 24th, 2020, Independent
Words: Marcus Whale

One of the most highly anticipated albums of the year, 25-year old singer-songwriter Phoebe Bridgers has released her sophomore solo album, Punisher, on Dead Oceans.

Bridgers released her debut album in 2017 as a relatively unknown singer-songwriter living in Los Angeles. A little over two years later, she’s become an internationally lauded musician with three acclaimed bodies of work to her name: her solo debut, Stranger In The Alps, the boygenius EP with Julien Baker and Lucy Dacus in 2018, and Better Oblivion Community Center, a surprise collaboration with Conor Oberst, in 2019. 

Bridgers is a singular talent, and also the rare artist with enough humour to deconstruct the tired heuristics of a meteoric rise. Punisher, written and recorded between the summer of 2018 and the autumn of 2019, cements her as one of the most irresistibly clever and tenderly prolific songwriters of our era. Returning to work with her Stranger In The Alps collaborators Tony Berg and Ethan Gruska, Bridgers - who co-produced the boygenius EP and Better Oblivion Community Center album - stepped into the role of co-producer for Punisher and has drawn from the same tight-knit group of musicians who appeared on her debut as well as those she has worked with since. The album includes Bridgers’ band of Marshall Vore (drums), Harrison Whitford (guitar),  Emily Restas (bass) and Nick White (piano) as well as performances from Conor Oberst, Lucy Dacus, Julien Baker, Blake Mills, Jenny Lee Lindberg, Christian Lee Hutson, Nick Zinner, legendary drummer Jim Keltner, and Bright Eyes’ Nathaniel Walcott on horns. Punisher was mixed by Mike Mogis, who also mixed Stranger In The Alps.

Release: June 19, 2020, Dead Oceans/Inertia
​Words: Dead Oceans

Simona Castricum is one of Melbourne’s most unique underground electronic artists, DJs and producers of emotionally textured synthwave and technopop. Hers is inspired by gender and sexual nonconformity, relationships with architecture and dreamy futures of transgender cities between URL and IRL spaces. Simona’s iconic live performances are cardio-electronic percussive expressions in rubberism, smoke haze and laser beams, shared catharsis, and self-confrontation.
 
Panic/Desire is the third full length album from Simona Castricum — an allegory about gender nonconformity lived in the spaces between urban and digital realms.
 
Of the album, Simona says:
 
“Panic/Desire is the soundtrack to my experiences of the city as a gender nonconforming person; songs about how I move and navigate through the city in the night; how I find a place of belonging — somewhere between my fears and desires. Panic/Desire is about transition, resistance, empathy, and how the city, its architecture, and its relationship to tactile and virtual worlds hold archives of emotion that influence the way I move a feel about urban space.

Release: July 19th, 2020, Trans-Brunswick Express
Words: Brain Drain PR