TL;DR:

• American Football b/w Ethel Meserve benefit single releasing July 17

• Jawbreaker on Cello is finally on streaming services

• I play cello on two new Tierney Tough singles out now

• Recommendation: ArtistKit.co for musician websites

• There’s a TON of great new music being released right now (partial list below)

The Long Version

Hello!

I am getting ready to release a new benefit single for Southern Poverty Law Center on July 17. The A side will be a cello arrangement of American Football’s classic “Never Meant”, and the B side will be an arrangement of Ethel Meserve’s “Calba’s Last”. I’ll also join Ethel Meserve on a song at their DC show on 7/12 (sold out, sorry).

If you never listened to Ethel Meserve during their original 90s run, go check out their groundbreaking work from this period. They recently got picked up by Numero Group (who I presume will reissue some of their original material soon) and have re-formed, touring with fellow Numero band Jejune. E.M.’s music sat at the intersection of post-hardcore, early mathrock, second-wave emo, and the like — but can’t be pigeonholed into any of those subgenres. They were also the band that set me on a different path — their live set at a show in my hometown in 1994 blew my mind and showed my friends and I that there was more to independent music than Nirvana and Smashing Pumpkins. I’m particularly happy to have finally arranged one of their songs for cello, and I hope you all will like it too.

Once these tracks are premiered, I’ll let you know! But you can pre-order it now.

In the meantime, I’m also putting most of my back catalog back on streaming. Jawbreaker On Cello is now available on the major services, and the other albums will follow throughout the coming weeks.

Tierney Tough, the esteemed leader of Orlando indietronica band The Pauses, recently released two new solo singles, which you can get on Bandcamp and Subvert.fm. I was honored to play cello on both of these excellent, dark indie ballads. Check them out!

For fellow musicians: I recommend ArtistKit.co, a new one-page website builder made by a guy in Berlin named Phil. It’s so much better than using LinkTree as a website (or having no website at all), and it’s far less expensive than a bloated service like SquareSpace. This is not an ad, I just think it’s great.

There seems to be an enormous amount of great new music being released this year, in spite of the general awfulness of the world and 2026 in general. I hope this brings you some joy and hope, as it does for me. Here are a few recent favorites:

• Angine de Poitrine: Vol. II (of course)

  • A video of my thoughts (don’t have demand avoidance just because “too many” people say AdP is good!)

• Honeybee - Only Dark Shit (Cleveland slowpunk/heavy shoegaze)

• Genesis Owusu - Redstar Wu and the Worldwide Scourge (Australian post-punk/rap)

• The new Boards of Canada

• Clovers Daughter - Fragile Feeling EP (heavy indie folk from Minneapolis)

• War On Women - Time Under Tension (Baltimore feminist post-hardcore)

• On Le Ore - Origami Ghost (NYC indie rock with healthy Sonic Youth & Interpol influences)

• The new Failure album

• The new American Football album (the best possible “adult contemporary emo” one could imagine!)

• Bach Artillerie (drum/synth Bach re-imaginings, like a modern “Switched on Bach” — featuring a member of Deerhoof!)

• Holy Fuck - Event Beat

• Continuals - Never Sleep

• Cashier - The Weight EP

I try to feature & review new music periodically on social media, including a new series called “Regional Indie Bands Obviously Spending Their Last $15 on a Digital Ad”.

What are you listening to???