In 2013, (Parenthetical Elephant) released their long-awaited fourth album “Torn Not Bitten.”

Terrence Abernathy (“Tee” to his friends and fans) describes their sound as “the kind of music we thought adults listened to when we were younger.” The band began in high school and quickly built up a fan base, which gained momentum as they toured, first in the Asheville, NC, area and then along the eastern seaboard, and then on the West Coast, too. Poppy enough to be catchy, indie enough to be different, folky enough to have some earthiness, and jazzy enough to have some soul, (Parenthetical Elephant) is determined to put a pep in your step and a swing in your hips.
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[Scan of paper is by me.
Typeface is BM Kirang Haerang.]

“Thriving in Conditions of Neglect” is Begging for Disaster’s first album. Their self-described “emo folk” is both evocative and silly with a heavy dose of irreverence.

The name was born when fiddler Tamara Wilson brought home her first plant bb, a ZZ, which are notoriously “easy to care for” and (allegedly) “thrive in conditions of neglect.” The ZZ plant lasted three weeks in her care before it was beyond reviving, and Tamara hosted a plant funeral for her and her band mates, where they buried it in her backyard.
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[Photo is by me.
Handwriting is by me.]

Sunk-Cost Fallacy released their 3rd album “Honor the Fatigue” in 2022.

When questioned about their band name, the indie punk group’s drummer and songwriter said, with a smirk: “It’s not even that we’re wild about being musicians; it’s just that we’ve already put so much time and effort and money into this that we may as well … you know, keep going.”
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[Photos are from Mathias Reding and Oleg Jonins on Unsplash.
Typeface is Bodoni 72 Oldstyle.]

“Dried Flowers from the Day You Said You Loved Me,” released in 2009 by He Knows I Thought Goodbye, takes the listener on a surprisingly nuanced, complex, and heart-aching journey. Singer-songwriter Alex Yi shaped this story (told in different perspectives throughout the album) loosely based around their life growing up in Austin, TX, in the 80s. The sweetness, the innocence of it all, will haunt you.

Crying Meatbags Who Insist on Touching released their long-awaited fourth album “[Comforts in Italian]” in 2003, much to the appreciation of their adoring fans who had been kept waiting 7 years since their last album release. Antoinette Valentino, who is the singer and primary songwriter of the group, has shared that the inspiration for the album title came from attending a poetry reading by someone who lost their hearing at a young age. This poet who is deaf shared that they keep a list of their favorite subtitles in movies and shows, especially the ones that describe the setting + background noises, and it inspired Antoinette to do the same.

It is rumored that her grandmother, who arrived in America when she was a young woman and didn’t speak any English upon her arrival, is responsible for the group’s name … and several existential crises.
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[Photos, sourced from unsplash, by: Mae Mu and Anna Kumpan]

Fragments of Fred is a lesser-known emo band from the early 2000s. They gained some recognition with their second album “I’ll Forgive Your Mother in the Morning” (released in 2005), but they lost popularity when the lead singer Agatha Fünke was arrested for getting blackout drunk and belligerent at a children’s puppet show, screaming in a slurred shriek, as she was escorted from the premises, “PUPPETS ARE JUST KINKY BASHTARDS WHO LIKE TO GET FIS-“
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[One image shows my hand as it was scanned in motion; other photo for texture, sourced from unsplash, by: Malik Skydsgaard.
Typeface is: Burnaby]

In 2018, Purveyors of Post-Truth released their debut album “Liquid Epiphany.” Blending political philosophy with EDM may seem unconventional, but as one steadfast fan commented: “It’s their drops that really get you, dude. You gotta just … I don’t know, like, embrace the feeling of overwhelm and then let the drop just take you right over the edge. You know what I mean? It’s just, like … unreal, man. And I think it’s all, like … a metaphor for society, or something?”
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[Photos, sourced from unsplash, by: Scott Evans, Efe Kurnaz, and Atul Vinayak.
Typeface is: CarlMarx, which I tweaked a bit for the band’s logotype.]

Lead singer Sally Slithers started the punk pop band Malicious Compliance in 2017. “Hard-Pressed with Short Notice” is their third album, released in 2022, and it leans into more lyrical storytelling.

Slithers got vulnerable in an interview on the podcast Jumbodesk, which features up and coming artists: “Having a name like mine … well, it certainly got me a lot of attention at school. Teachers always laughed, bullies liked to target me; I couldn’t hide. So I had to learn to stand up for myself, I had to at least pretend that I believed my voice mattered so I would have a chance that other people would believe it, too. I think a lot of women in our culture reroute their anger into sadness, and I just want to say, in case anyone out there needs to hear it … It’s okay to be mad. Actually, I’d even go so far as to say that it’s unacceptable NOT to be mad. Rage-filled women to the front, you know? We got sh!t to do.”
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[Photo of Australian Water Python by David Clode on Unsplash. Photo of graffiti by Nate Bell on Unsplash.
Typeface is Bimbo Pro: Dripping Jumbo for band name + Sharpie for album title.]

A Fellow Unfortunate released their debut album “Only a Little Bit True” in 2008. A blend of folk, country, and indie, the group has been classified as “sad dad music” by their fans — but while that category label made guitarist and lead singer/songwriter Trevor Donoghue chuckle, he doesn’t want the band to be boxed in. Their lyrics are often (at least) semi-autobiographical, so Trevor can’t say with any certainty how their sound is going to evolve. In an interview with local Ohio music magazine “Ohio Fidelity” after the album release, Trevor was quoted as saying: “It just depends on what happens next, you know? Best laid plans, and all that …”

The fans were shocked when a few years later, the band released a funk album.
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[@trevordonoghuephoto kindly provided the portrait of himself for this project. Photo taken by @hlensinfocus … While the name and likeness are true, the rest — as usual — is complete nonsense.
Typeface is Avenir.]

Victim of Winter’s first and self-titled album, released in 1997, won a dedicated fan base with their melancholy raw alt-punk-pop sound. During an interview with their local Minneapolis newspaper “The Trying Times,” the drummer Bethanie Jónsson reflected that the band came together as more of an accident than anything intentional: “We were five musicians stranded at a bus stop in a snow storm, and the bus was cancelled, so we did what any five strangers with their instruments would do in that situation … We started making music, man. It felt like a pre-destined mythic origin story — you can’t make this shit up.”
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[Photos sourced from unsplash, by: Simon Berger, Kseniya Lapteva, and Valentin Salja]

Ecstasy Flex released their debut album “Inches Away From Decent” in 2018. Main songwriter and lead singer Denise Deerwater cites a visit to the Leeds Art Gallery as the inspiration behind their band name: “We were visiting a friend in the UK, and we popped into this museum in the city centre, and while we were wandering around, we had to stop because we were totally in awe of this reclined, stretching woman who had been carved out of stone (marble, maybe?) and the artist’s commitment to lifelike detail. Our awe must have been obvious because one of the docents came up to us to chat about the piece a little bit more, and she shared that the way that the toe had been shaped, to support the idea that this woman was stretching as she languished, is called ‘ecstasy flex’ — and I was just like, ‘That’s it! That’s our band name.’”

Music critic Alan Tennebaum describes this folky lo-fi (with subtle Native American influences) as the aural equivalent of an ecstasy flex. “This group could not be more aptly named,” he wrote.
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[I took the photo of my profile shadow in bed during my time living in Leeds, UK.
Typeface is Audrielle No 2.]

“A Brutal Little Truth,” the first album by Infinity Days, has earned a committed indie following since its release in the fall of 2020.

Lead violinist and lyricist Lucy Brown mused, “Quarantine felt endless. It messed with my sense of time, like getting hit hard in the head can mess with your depth perception. Something that had happened that morning could feel like it had happened a week ago, or 6 months ago. Time lost all meaning, all context, all relevance. I was trapped in an endless loop, with no differentiation between the days. I lived alone, and I knew I had to write, to document these ‘infinity days’ in some way, in the only way I could grasp — or I would completely lose my mind.”
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[I took the photos of the chamomile I grew and my bedroom windowsill lined with my plants.
The handwriting is my own.]

Some Other Third Thing released their first album “On Second Thought” in 2023. The lead singer Emily Tens shared in a recent interview that she always paid special attention to numbers as they pop up in her everyday, believing that her grandmother who passed on is sending her messages to indicate if she’s on the right path in life.

Upon hearing this debut album, music critic Tom Boyd from her hometown of Sixes, Oregon, reflected, in response to that interview tidbit, “Well, it certainly sounds like she’s doing something right.”

The album twists hope and regret around each other, throughout song after song, in a unique indie folk sound. Emily’s low gravelly voice leaves us yearning for more.
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[Photo of hands by I.am_nah on Unsplash. Original photo of seed pod through canvas by me.
Typeface is Adventures Unlimited Script.]

A Small Epiphany’s second album, “The Arrogance of Plans,” was released during spring 2020, and its reflective melodies and thoughtfully shaped mood are in sharp contrast to their other, more raw, harsh work released to date. Instead of just adding aural texture like their older songs, the lyrics in this album definitively tell a story, one of loss and longing and things undone. Songwriter and lead vocalist Raj Winston says of the process of creating this album, “We actually started out by wanting to focus on something hopeful in these dark times ... but, uh, I guess the music had other plans for us.”