Here are all your new faves in one listening booth! Frail Hands: Jody Upshaw: Kids Losing Sleep: Maura Whitman: Smear Frames: Worst Part: Bear Le Friends: Alexander and the Great Ones: Hosta: I. by Hosta Shay Pitts: Related Stories
New Music 2018
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New Music 2018: Jody Upshaw & Shay Pitts
Jody Upshaw and Shay Pitts bound into a downtown coffee shop together, so engrossed in conversation they move through the doorframe at the same time. The two teens’ laughter trails as they push into a corner booth, discussing how Pitts is newly grounded for the small diamond stud sitting directly under her nose. They’re best […]
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New Music 2018: Maura Whitman
Maura Whitman is only a teenager and is already more together than you’ll ever be. The Halifax singer—who describes her style as a pop-/R&B fusion (“I really love Alicia Keys, I think she’s super cool—mostly because I play the piano and she influenced me in that sense, and I really love Demi Lovato and her […]
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New Music 2018: Worst Part
“I’m that shy kid who never talks to people at shows,” says Lor Sangster, drummer for the trio Worst Part. But when her other band, Kilmore, played with a show with Scumgrief, she connected with guitarist Andrew Gagne. A year or so later, with bassist Sean McInnis, Worst Part was born. Its first EP, Heel, […]
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New Music 2018: Smear Frames
Robert Drisdelle is music-obsessed. When the Century Egg guitarist isn’t working on the band’s upcoming record, he’s nerding out over Japanese rock music, learning about the maximalist production styles of DJ/composer/producer Yasutaka Nakata and spinning ideas for how this influence could appear in his own work. And when he’s not, as he puts it with […]
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New Music 2018: Hosta
The guitarist Kayla Stevens is a vital member of multiple bands around town—most actively Crossed Wires and Vulva Culture, as well as the punk outfits Science Project and Mark Vodka (in which she plays bass). “This project is a result of me collecting pedals for the last couple years,” she says of Hosta, her new […]
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New Music 2018: Alexander and the Great Ones
Alexander MacNeil, the wry leader of Alexander and the Great Ones, is a Nova Scotia native, but he was gone for awhile. “I was working and avoiding responsibility,” he says of his time in Dawson City, Yukon. “I worked at a hotel and wrote most of what will be my new album on a piano […]
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New Music 2018: Bear Le Friends
The rock-fusion band Bear Le Friends (barely friends) throws things back in a variety of ways with sharp vests, multiple vocalists and a whopping six members. “I love having so many voices around,” says vocalist/guitarist Brad Hill. “It makes the whole process so much more fun. It’s much more compromise, so many different avenues for […]
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New Music 2018: Kids Losing Sleep
When three of the four members of the pop-rock band Kids Losing Sleep start listing their influences, they shuffle around in a cafe booth, their matching black Converse-shod feet clapping as names get bounced around emphatically. Bassist Brycen Gunn loves Led Zeppelin, something that carries into the band’s churning rhythms, while the whole gang’s devout […]
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New Music 2018: Frail Hands
From the opening notes of Frail Hands’ debut, S / T, it’s clear the “melody-driven hardcore” five-piece’s name isn’t picked for literal reasons: Guitars offer punk-tinged noodling as the beat knocks your eardrums off the sides of your brain. It takes something decidedly un-frail to make a sound so ferocious—and, as guitarist Tom Burke puts […]