HADLEY LEE NIGHTCAP by Sam Sweet: Rediscovering Acetone, LA’s Perfect Forgotten Band

By Shelby

“Reading it feels less like consuming a traditional rock biography and more like entering into a mood, a spell, a place where music, people, and landscape blur together. Sweet is right that their music belongs to Los Angeles, to its endless freeways and its ocean light, but it also belongs to anyone who stumbles across it now, years later, and feels something in it open like a window.”

SIT, RESIST: The Scrappy Avalanche of Laura Stevenson’s Greatest Album

By Piper

“With styles spanning across folk, rock, punk, alt-country, and pop, this album is uneven and uncontained, something that might turn off listeners searching for continuity, but its uncertain nature is what keeps me so enamored…In its risk and wonder, I can’t help but celebrate its abnormalities, its loose spokes, its tumbling style; I can’t help but trust Stevenson enough to stand on the ledge with her.”

I LOVE HIGH LAND, HARD RAIN BY AZTEC CAMERA

By Shelby, indeed

“If one were feeling critical—say, if one were in a dark enough place to be completely numb to life’s small pleasures—I could be persuaded to admit that the album is occasionally uneven, repetitive, maybe even a bit predictable. But I just listened to High Land, Hard Rain, so I’m not in the mood for that right now. Instead, I want to talk about how this record feels like a direct injection of summertime joy, straight to the veins.”

CAMERON WINTER’S HEAVY METAL: A HALLUCINATION I NEVER WANTED TO END

It’s by Piper!

“Where many other lyricists try to draw lines around universal concepts—love, death, hope, failure—to create a sitting room for a shared resonance, Winter’s existential jump-roping gets at the heart of how little anyone knows of each other, of how little we know of ourselves. Is there such a thing as a shared truth of a person, of a dream? What’s more sincere than leaning into life’s nonsense?”